How do I configure portable parallel builds in CMake?

Is it somehow possible to be able to have a parallel build no matter which build tool is used?

Under Unix we can add make -jN where N are the number of threads, and under Windows I added to the CXX_FLAG "/MP" which is then used in Visual Studio to parallel build...(?) How can I make my version such that CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM is not always extended when I run CMake?

What is a general solution?

I came up with this:

# Add some multithreaded build support
MARK_AS_ADVANCED(MULTITHREADED_BUILD)
set(MULTITHREADED_BUILD 12 CACHE STRING "How many threads are used to build the project")
if(MULTITHREADED_BUILD)
    if(${CMAKE_GENERATOR} MATCHES "Unix Makefiles")
            message(STATUS ${CMAKE_BUILD_TOOL})
            set(CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM "${CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM} -j${MULTITHREADED_BUILD}")
            message(STATUS "Added arguments to CMAKE_BUILD_TOOL: ${CMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM}")
    elseif(MSVC)
      set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} /MP")
      message(STATUS "Added parallel build arguments to CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS: ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS}")
    endif()
endif()

Solution

With CMake 3.12 this is possible. From the release notes:

The cmake(1) Build a Project (cmake --build) gained --parallel [<jobs>] and -j [<jobs>] options to specify a parallel build level. They map to corresponding options of the native build tool.

As mentioned by dkg, you can also set the environment variable CMAKE_BUILD_PARALLEL_LEVEL.

Links to CMake's documentation: