In case anyone wants to know the actual answer, it stands for cross platform make, and my understanding is that it’s for generating build project files for various development environments. For instance, with one CMake file you can generate a Visual Studio Solution file, an XCode project file, a Makefile, etc. Several IDEs are also able to read CMake files directly.
That works until you need to support Visual Studio or Xcode. Then you either maintain their stuff manually too, or you get CMake to generate all three. I don’t love it but it solves the problem it’s meant to solve. The issue is people using it when they don’t need to.
I think #1 is a different hippo, not Moo Deng