[SOLVED] CMake unable to determine linker language with C++

Issue

I'm attempting to run a cmake hello world program on Windows 7 x64 with both Visual Studio 2010 and Cygwin, but can't seem to get either to work. My directory structure is as follows:

HelloWorld
-- CMakeLists.txt
-- src/
-- -- CMakeLists.txt
-- -- main.cpp
-- build/

I do a cd build followed by a cmake .., and get an error stating that

CMake Error: CMake can not determine linker language for target:helloworld
CMake Error: Cannot determine link language for target "helloworld".

However, if I change the extension of main.cpp to main.c both on my filsystem and in src/CMakeLists.txt everything works as expected. This is the case running from both the Visual Studio Command Prompt (Visual Studio Solution Generator) and the Cygwin Terminal (Unix Makefiles Generator).

Any idea why this code wouldn't work?

CMakeLists.txt

PROJECT(HelloWorld C)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

# include the cmake modules directory
set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${HelloWorld_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH})

add_subdirectory(src)

src/CMakeLists.txt

# Include the directory itself as a path to include directories
set(CMAKE_INCLUDE_CURRENT_DIR ON)

# Create a variable called helloworld_SOURCES containing all .cpp files:
set(HelloWorld_SOURCES main.cpp)

# Create an executable file called helloworld from sources:
add_executable(hello ${HelloWorld_SOURCES })

src/main.cpp

int main()
{
  return 0;
}

Solution

Try changing

PROJECT(HelloWorld C)

into

PROJECT(HelloWorld C CXX)

or just

PROJECT(HelloWorld)

See: http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/v2.8.8/cmake.html#command:project

Answered By - olovb