cmake .. is stuck in `-- Detecting C compile features - done`

[steinathan]

cmake .. is stuck in -- Detecting C compile features - done (for hours now)

I'm not a cpp expert so can't debug this, please help

[particlesector]

Thanks for reporting this and including the screenshot — really helpful!

The cmake process isn't actually frozen at that point. Right after the compiler detection step, cmake begins silently downloading several dependencies from GitHub (asio, Crow, nlohmann/json, cpp-httplib, and sqlite3). With no visible output during the download, it can look completely stuck for quite a while. I've just pushed a fix that enables progress output and uses faster shallow clones, so future builds will show active download status instead of appearing frozen.

If you'd rather skip building from source entirely, we provide pre-built macOS binaries on the Releases page — that's the easiest way to get up and running quickly.

If you do want to build from source, one thing worth noting for macOS — this project requires C++20 jthread support, which works best with GCC 13 rather than the default Apple compiler. Our CI builds use GCC 13, so it's worth matching that setup locally:

brew install gcc@13
Then run cmake with:

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=gcc-13 -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-13
cmake --build build --config Release
It's also worth doing a quick sanity check to make sure git can reach GitHub before running cmake, since a slow or interrupted connection during the download phase can cause an indefinite hang:

git ls-remote https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio.git HEAD
If that returns a hash quickly, you're good to go. Please pull the latest main and give it another try — hope this gets you going!