Does scikit-build support compilers other than msvc on windows?

[xsxszab]

In one of my projects, I need to use icx (from Intel oneAPI) as the C++ compiler when building with pip. I’m using the following command:

set "CMAKE_ARGS=-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=icx" && pip install .

For reference, my project uses scikit-build as the build backend, configured as follows in pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
requires = ["scikit-build-core", "setuptools>=64.0"]
build-backend = "scikit_build_core.build"

However, during compilation, pip always defaults to using MSVC as the compiler, ignoring the CMAKE_ARGS environment variable I set.

In contrast, when I build the C++ portion of the project directly using cmake, it correctly picks icx as expected:

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=icx
cmake --build build

This works without any issues.

My question is: Does this behavior imply that scikit-build is hardcoded to use MSVC on Windows? If so, is there a way to override this behavior?

[LecrisUT]

It should be supported. Can you share the cmake configure log?

$ pip install . -v --config-settings=--cmake.define.CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=icx

You can also add --config-settings=logging.level=DEBUG to check what logic scikit-build-core was using

[henryiii]

Why do you need setuptools too? Just out of curiosity, does setting CMAKE_GENERATOR to Ninja change anything?