In order to debug CMake project the user has the following choices:

• add message() calls
• add variable_watch() calls
• run CMake with --trace-expand and then grep the output

The latter has all the information what a user would need to debug. Unfortunately, it's very verbose.

If Qt Creator had a way to playback the trace file and examine the values, it would be very useful.

Visual GDB has an integration in Visual Studio, which looks pretty nice.