主题：人类有史以来最庞大/划时代的软件项目—kde4已经成熟了 -- 黑传说

CMake was created in response to the need for a powerful, cross-platform build environment for the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) funded by NLM as part of the Visible Human Project. It was influenced by an earlier system called pcmaker created by Ken Martin and other developers to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) open source 3D graphics and visualization system. To create CMake, Bill Hoffman at Kitware incorporated some key ideas from pcmaker, and added many more of his own, with the thought to adopt some of the functionality of the Unix configure tool. The initial CMake implementation was mid-2000, with accelerated development occurring in early 2001.

CMake is an extensible, open-source system that manages the build process in an operating system and in a compiler-independent manner. Unlike many cross-platform systems, CMake is designed to be used in conjunction with the native build environment.

CMake is designed to support complex directory hierarchies and applications dependent on several libraries.