liboqs

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Instead of depending on make/msbuild etc, we should use only modern cmake and ctest, such as

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_FLAGS...
cmake --build build --parallel 4 [--target ... ]
ctest --test-dir build

This is platform-independent and saves a lot of headaches, and completely removes make and msbuild explicit dependencies. See https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs-cpp/blob/main/.github/workflows/cmake.yml for an example.

So cmake --build build would also replace ninja?

I don't mind, though I haven't had any trouble with our current build sequence.

The first two commands work fine for me, but ctest --test-dir build doesn't do anything. I'm guessing this is because our test suite is under a custom target (run_tests) rather than some default name?

Yes, it'll replace ninja, and is completely platform-independent. I'll look into the test suite...

cmake --build build --target run_tests runs the test suite, but it'll be preferably to be able to use ctest instead.

I like the platform-independence aspect (particularly looking at oqs-provider for Windows right now). What makes me wonder, though, is how this will impact build+test/CI runtime: ninja always nicely & automatically takes the maximum amount of CPUs available. The proposal above seems to require a hardcoded number of CPUs (that may or may not be available, i.e., run too slow if more CPUs were available and may overwhelm the machine if too many are spec'd).

I did --parallel without a number, and it seemed to use the maximum number of CPUs on my machine, running about as fast as ninja does.

@dstebila Thanks, that's good to know, I didn't know we can use the flag without a number