IAR Environment Variables in CMake

The IAR Embedded Workbench IDE classic project format (*.ewp) provides internal environment variables such as for "Project directory" ($PROJ_DIR$) or for "Product directory" ($TOOLKIT_DIR$). These are called "Argument Variables" and they are not automatically propagated to CMake projects.

Helpful Resources

• IAR Argument Variables
• CMAKE_<lang>_COMPILER
• CMAKE_COMMAND
• PROJECT_NAME
• PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR
• add_custom_target()
• cmake_path()
• message()
• set()

Description

In your CMakeLists.txt use the following CMake commands after project() to get the corresponding IAR IDE Argument Variables counterparts, assuming that the project is using the C language:

# Get the IAR IDE Argument Variables in CMake
cmake_path(GET CMAKE_C_COMPILER PARENT_PATH COMPILER_DIR)
cmake_path(GET COMPILER_DIR PARENT_PATH TOOLKIT_DIR)
cmake_path(GET TOOLKIT_DIR PARENT_PATH EW_DIR)
set(PROJ_DIR "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}")
set(PROJ_FNAME ${PROJECT_NAME})

Note

Referencing CMake Variables differs syntactically from referencing IAR Argument Variables:

IAR Argument Variable	CMake Variable
$VARIABLE_NAME$	${VARIABLE_NAME}

Example

Now you can use these variables to reference those paths and resources in your CMake project. For example:

project(MyProject C ASM)
# ...
# Get the IAR IDE Argument Variables in CMake
# ...
target_link_options(MyTarget1 PRIVATE --semihosting --config=${TOOLKIT_DIR}/config/generic.icf)
# ...
target_link_options(MyTarget2 PRIVATE --vfe --map=. --config=${PROJ_DIR}/${PROJ_FNAME}.icf)

Target-oriented Argument Variables

CMake offers target-oriented Generator Expressions for accessing Target Artifacts information. For example, when using with a target named tgt:

set(TARGET_DIR $<TARGET_FILE_DIR:tgt>)
set(TARGET_PATH $<TARGET_FILE:tgt>)

These can be consumed directly by target-oriented commands such as target_compile_options(), target_compile_definitions() or target_link_options().

Tip

It is not possible to access the output of generator expressions at configure-time (e.g., via message()). One trick for debugging such expressions at build time is to rely on add_custom_target():

add_custom_target(genex-tgt-dir COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E echo "${TARGET_DIR}")
add_custom_target(genex-tgt-path COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E echo "${TARGET_PATH}")

Then, build with cmake --build ... --target genex-tgt-dir and cmake --build ... --target genex-tgt-path to print the result.

Summary

It is possible to render almost any desired IAR Argument Variables in a CMake project so that its environment becomes more familiar.