Using pre-compiled headers with CMake

Question

I have seen a few (old) posts on the \'net about hacking together some support for pre-compiled headers in CMake. They all seem a bit all-over the place and everyone has the

Answer 1

IMHO the best way is to set PCH for whole project, as martjno suggested, combined with ability of ignoring PCH for some sources if needed (e.g. generated sources):

# set PCH for VS project
function(SET_TARGET_PRECOMPILED_HEADER Target PrecompiledHeader PrecompiledSource)
  if(MSVC)
     SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES(${Target} PROPERTIES COMPILE_FLAGS "/Yu${PrecompiledHeader}")
     set_source_files_properties(${PrecompiledSource} PROPERTIES COMPILE_FLAGS "/Yc${PrecompiledHeader}")
  endif(MSVC)
endfunction(SET_TARGET_PRECOMPILED_HEADER)

# ignore PCH for a specified list of files
function(IGNORE_PRECOMPILED_HEADER SourcesVar)
  if(MSVC)  
    set_source_files_properties(${${SourcesVar}} PROPERTIES COMPILE_FLAGS "/Y-")
  endif(MSVC)
endfunction(IGNORE_PRECOMPILED_HEADER)

So, if you have some target MY_TARGET, and list of generated sources IGNORE_PCH_SRC_LIST you'll simply do:

SET_TARGET_PRECOMPILED_HEADER(MY_TARGET stdafx.h stdafx.cpp)
IGNORE_PRECOMPILED_HEADER(IGNORE_PCH_SRC_LIST)

This aproach is tested and works perfectly.