It's the recommended way to set those, and is more portable
(automatically prepends -D for GCC/Clang and /D for MSVC).
We still use CPPFLAGS for some pre-processor flags which are not
defines.
Include paths are processed from left to right, so we use Prepend to
ensure that paths to bundled thirdparty files will have precedence over
system paths (e.g. `/usr/include` should have lowest priority).
Many contributors (me included) did not fully understand what CCFLAGS,
CXXFLAGS and CPPFLAGS refer to exactly, and were thus not using them
in the way they are intended to be.
As per the SCons manual: https://www.scons.org/doc/HTML/scons-user/apa.html
- CCFLAGS: General options that are passed to the C and C++ compilers.
- CFLAGS: General options that are passed to the C compiler (C only;
not C++).
- CXXFLAGS: General options that are passed to the C++ compiler. By
default, this includes the value of $CCFLAGS, so that setting
$CCFLAGS affects both C and C++ compilation.
- CPPFLAGS: User-specified C preprocessor options. These will be
included in any command that uses the C preprocessor, including not
just compilation of C and C++ source files [...], but also [...]
Fortran [...] and [...] assembly language source file[s].
TL;DR: Compiler options go to CCFLAGS, unless they must be restricted
to either C (CFLAGS) or C++ (CXXFLAGS). Preprocessor defines go to
CPPFLAGS.
Rémi Verschelde
Windy Darian
Juan Linietsky