It’s fine if you want searching, but I disagree that it’s implicitly wrong not to do it because searching is supposedly standard and how everyone else is doing it. Never mind that there exists plenty of software (with far more specific requirements than “give me an object file/dll/executable, compiler version/ABI/options be damned”) that doesn’t use such an approach. For example, try to tell CMake how to create a freestanding executable (one that doesn’t link to the system C library). You end up fighting against the abstractions inherent in its design. Which is to say, depending on what you want to do, it might not be a good fit, and you may be better off just writing out your compiler options yourself.

Here’s part of the powershell version of a build script I have used, where I had fewer build variants, so I didn’t even bother to make a `build` function, I just copy paste the `out=... ; if { ... }` block and change the value of `$out` and which compiler and options are called. Note that you can accomplish this with far fewer variables if you don’t want quite as many build variants as this script supports — it was written as an illustration of how flexible you can make things, rather than how simple things can be, so it supports clang, clang-cl, cl, zig cc, with variants for asan, freestanding, for architectures x86, x64, aarch64:

    $ml = @("-nologo","-c","-Zd","-WX","-W3")
    ...

    $clstd = @("-volatile:iso","-permissive-")
    $clangcl = @("-nologo","-diagnostics:column","-Z7","-Zo","-FC") + $clstd
    $cl = $clangcl + @("-WL","-Gm-","-utf-8")
    # -Wall > -W4 but includes very silly things like "function not inlined" for snprintf
    $clwx = @("-WX","-W4","-wd4100","-wd4127")
    ...
    $clfree = @("-D","EXAMPLE_FREESTANDING","-Zl","-GS-","-sdl-","-Gs9999999")
    $clfreedebug = $clwx + $clodebug + $cldd + $clfree + $clnortti + $clhash + $cllink + $link + $linkfree
    ...
    $out = "./x86_64-windows-free-cl-debug"
    if ("all" -in $targets -or (split-path -path $out -leaf) -in $targets) {
        new-item -itemtype directory -force $out | out-null
        try {
            push-location $out
            $buildcount++
            write-host (split-path -path $out -leaf)
            ml64 @ml $src/example-x64.asm
            cl "-Fm./example.map" "-Tc$src/example.c" ./example-x64.obj @cl @clfreedebug
        } finally { pop-location ; }
    }

If you have an issue, you can easily change compiler options. It will always work and won’t suddenly break if you install a second set of compilers for another project, whereas CMake will have to choose which one and might pick wrong. Likewise, there is no potential for an upgrade to CMake to decide to use different compiler options that interfere with the freestanding stuff. You lose CMake’s abstractions, but like I said, that may be a good thing, depending on what your requirements are, assuming you have detailed knowledge of the compiler (which I’d rather accumulate than detailed knowledge of CMake, and I would know, I have both).