I’m wondering how much effort it’s worth spending on continuing to support the Borland Makefiles generator. Does anyone know whether it is still actively supported? The history of Borland as a company is complex, eventually being bought out by Micro Focus in 2009, with some parts of the company being spun out well before then. It isn’t clear whether Borland make stopped being relevant long ago or whether there’s still a niche area that uses it. Anyone able to shed some light on its current use (or lack thereof)?
What kinds of problems are you running into? My experience is that most of it is factored out into the generic makefiles generator. AFAIK, it’s the only tool provided by the Borland SDK. So for anyone still using it, they may need to find a new build tool (or stop using newer CMake). That said, I have no idea how much it is still used today.
IIRC the “Borland Makefiles” generator is the only one that knows how to generate compiler command lines for the Embarcadero compiler, which is still available (and even documents CMake integration).
I was trying to actually build CMake using the Embarcadero tools available for free download from here:
I don’t recall the exact error, but it was in code from kwsys. It’s possible I had some things not set up correctly. I was misconfiguring the setup I was trying to replicate anyway. I eventually worked out that I only needed to run the test suite for it, but use a CMake built with a different toolchain (basically replicating the two Borland nightly builds).
I don’t know that building CMake itself with Embarcadero is supported (IIRC, its stdlib is deficient). Generation for the compiler is definitely still supported though.
#TIL (from reddit) that Borland Turbo C/C++ is still taught in colleges in India, apparently because the curriculum is mandated by law and said laws are predictably out of date.
My fear is that, by the same token, Borland’s Makefile processor may also be part of said mandatory curriculum.
…Of course, in those cases there’s probably not much chance that students would have the option to avail themselves of CMake, so it may not matter… but, if nothing else it’s an interesting bit of party-trivia regarding a niche market of wildly outdated technologies.
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