Like seen in that other post a lot of people move from projucer to cmake. I don’t wanna hijack that post because my post’s perspective is a different one. I wanna give you arguments for why it’s worth it to support projucer instead of cmake.
I’d like to point out that audio dev seems vastly underdeveloped compared to game dev. you’ll see why this is important. i mean when you start up unity there is a program that manages your projects as well as each project individually and each project is opened in a dedicated editor with a 3d environment and everything where you can place prefabs without programming experience. even c++ environments like unreal have things that make setting up logic easier. i don’t wanna talk about all this here, and game dev is certainly not the holy grail of how every programming environment should be but i’d say audio dev can learn a lot from it workflow-wise because lots of people make games, obviously because it’s easy to do so, and that’s just cool.
So coming back to juce: i’m still more of a musician than a programmer after around 3 years of programming and using projucer is a major reason for why juce is not gatekeeping us musicians from participating in this wonderful craft, because we can easily set up projects.
But some people argue projucer is only for the newbs and everyone should move to cmake once things get serious, which is a sentiment that doesn’t exist in game dev or only in special cases i guess, and i think that shows that projucer has the potential to change our collective perception about this topic. In order to do we’d just have to eliminate the reasons for people to move to cmake.
The most major reason to switch to cmake seems to me when people try to make their own project templates and libraries on top of juce, cause rn if you do that with a projucer-based project you have to manually copy files, change the plugin id, and visual studio constantly warns you about using files from another project even though you clearly copied everything. that is not impossible or hard, but it feels rather sketchy and unprofessional. if the projucer could just have user-made templates that would basically solve this entirely.
Another reason that often appears is that people wanna make entire plugin suites, so they use cmake to handle updates in the code of shared files so that every project then gets rebuilt. But if the projucer had a new highlevel area for managing all projects then that area could also be in charge of updating these changes.
There are probably lots more ideas that could be added to make cmake obsolete and you are all invited to discuss them on this post, but these are the 2 aspects i’d consider most relevant.
You are also invited to discuss my initial theory: wether it is in fact good to support projucer in an attempt to make the gap between musician and programmer smaller, or if you think it’s just not worth it to try that for some reason.