Switching between GCC and Clang/LLVM using CMake

You can use the toolchain file mechanism of cmake for this purpose, see e.g. here. You write a toolchain file for each compiler containing the corresponding definitions. At config time, you run e.g

 cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/clang-toolchain.cmake ..

and all the compiler information will be set during the project() call from the toolchain file. Though in the documentation is mentionend only in the context of cross-compiling, it works as well for different compilers on the same system.

System wide C++ change on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install clang
sudo update-alternatives --config c++

Will print something like this:

  Selection    Path              Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/g++       20        auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/clang++   10        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/g++       20        manual mode

Then just select clang++.

CMake honors the environment variables CC and CXX upon detecting the C and C++ compiler to use:

$ export CC=/usr/bin/clang
$ export CXX=/usr/bin/clang++
$ cmake ..
-- The C compiler identification is Clang
-- The CXX compiler identification is Clang

The compiler specific flags can be overridden by putting them into a make override file and pointing the CMAKE_USER_MAKE_RULES_OVERRIDE variable to it. Create a file ~/ClangOverrides.txt with the following contents:

SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_INIT                "-Wall -std=c99")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_DEBUG_INIT          "-g")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_MINSIZEREL_INIT     "-Os -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELEASE_INIT        "-O3 -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_C_FLAGS_RELWITHDEBINFO_INIT "-O2 -g")

SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_INIT                "-Wall")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG_INIT          "-g")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_MINSIZEREL_INIT     "-Os -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE_INIT        "-O3 -DNDEBUG")
SET (CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELWITHDEBINFO_INIT "-O2 -g")

The suffix _INIT will make CMake initialize the corresponding *_FLAGS variable with the given value. Then invoke cmake in the following way:

$ cmake -DCMAKE_USER_MAKE_RULES_OVERRIDE=~/ClangOverrides.txt ..

Finally to force the use of the LLVM binutils, set the internal variable _CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX. This variable is honored by the CMakeFindBinUtils module:

$ cmake -D_CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_PREFIX=llvm- ..

Setting _CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_LOCATION is no longer necessary for CMake version 3.9 or newer.

Putting this all together you can write a shell wrapper which sets up the environment variables CC and CXX and then invokes cmake with the mentioned variable overrides.

Also see this CMake FAQ on make override files.