Portable Compiler Flags

To simplify the development of code that is portable across different architectures and compilers, BLT provides the blt_append_custom_compiler_flag macro, which allows users to easily place a compiler dependent flag into a CMake variable.

blt_append_custom_compiler_flag

To use this macro, supply a cmake variable in which to append a flag (FLAGS_VAR), and the appropriate flag for each of our supported compilers.

This macro currently supports the following compilers:

• GNU

• CLANG

• XL (IBM compiler)

• INTEL (Intel compiler)

• MSVC (Microsoft Visual Studio)

• MSVC_INTEL (Intel toolchain in Microsoft Visual Studio)

• PGI

Here is an example for setting the appropriate flag to treat warnings as errors:

blt_append_custom_compiler_flag(
  FLAGS_VAR BLT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS_FLAG
  DEFAULT  "-Werror"
  MSVC     "/WX"
  XL       "qhalt=w"
  )

Since values for GNU, CLANG and INTEL are not supplied, they will get the default value, -Werror, which is supplied by the macro’s DEFAULT argument.

BLT also provides a simple macro to add compiler flags to a target. You can append the above compiler flag to an already defined executable, such as example_1 with the following line:

blt_add_target_compile_flags(TO example_1
                             FLAGS BLT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS_FLAG )

Here is another example to disable warnings about unknown OpenMP pragmas in the code:

# Flag for disabling warnings about omp pragmas in the code
blt_append_custom_compiler_flag(
    FLAGS_VAR DISABLE_OMP_PRAGMA_WARNINGS_FLAG
    DEFAULT "-Wno-unknown-pragmas"
    XL      "-qignprag=omp"
    INTEL   "-diag-disable 3180"
    MSVC    "/wd4068"
    )

Note

GNU does not have a way to only disable warnings about OpenMP pragmas, so you must disable warnings about all unknown pragmas on this compiler.