Building SWAN with CMake

CMake is a cross-platform build system that creates native build files (for use with a generator GNU Make, Nmake or Ninja) for command line builds or project files for an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio). CMake makes use of configuration files that control the build process. We recommend to use CMake 3.12+ for building SWAN. There are installers available for Windows, Linux and macOS. See the download page for installation instructions.


Ninja is one of the many build generators to create executable files and libraries from source code. The way it works is very similar to GNU make; for example, it does not rebuild things that are already up to date. We recommend Ninja because it is faster than GNU make. Ninja can be downloaded from its git repository.