IAR Environment Variables in CMake

Introduction

The IAR Embedded Workbench IDE provides environment variables such as for "Project directory" ($PROJ_DIR$) or for "Product directory" ($TOOLKIT_DIR$) for classic projects. These are called "Argument Variables". As per IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm 9.50.1, these Argument Variables are not propagated to CMake projects.

Helpful Resources

• IAR Argument Variables
• get_filename_component()
• CMAKE_<lang>_COMPILER
• PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR
• set()

Description

It is possible to use CMake Variables to mimic any desired IAR Argument Variables in a CMake Project so that its environment becomes more familiar.

Notice that referencing IAR Argument Variables is syntactically different from referencing CMake Variables:

IAR Argument Variable	CMake Variable
$VARIABLE_NAME$	${VARIABLE_NAME}

Example 1 - TOOLKIT_DIR

• In your CMakeLists.txt set the following snippet to extract the parent directory of the selected compiler:

# Set the TOOLKIT_DIR variable for the CMakeLists
get_filename_component(BIN_DIR ${CMAKE_C_COMPILER} DIRECTORY)
get_filename_component(TOOLKIT_DIR ${BIN_DIR} PATH)
unset(BIN_DIR)

• Then you can use the ${TOOLKIT_DIR} variable to reference that directory in your CMake project. For example:

target_link_options(MyTarget PRIVATE --semihosting --config ${TOOLKIT_DIR}/config/generic.icf)

Example 2 - PROJ_DIR

• In CMake, PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR can be used to emulate PROJ_DIR:

set(PROJ_DIR ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR})

• Then you can simply use the ${PROJ_DIR} variable to reference that directory in your CMake project. For example:

target_link_options(MyTarget PRIVATE --semihosting --config ${PROJ_DIR}/MyCustomLinkerConfiguration.icf)