Book Image

CMake Cookbook

By : Radovan Bast, Roberto Di Remigio
Book Image

CMake Cookbook

By: Radovan Bast, Roberto Di Remigio

Overview of this book

CMake is cross-platform, open-source software for managing the build process in a portable fashion. This book features a collection of recipes and building blocks with tips and techniques for working with CMake, CTest, CPack, and CDash. CMake Cookbook includes real-world examples in the form of recipes that cover different ways to structure, configure, build, and test small- to large-scale code projects. You will learn to use CMake's command-line tools and master modern CMake practices for configuring, building, and testing binaries and libraries. With this book, you will be able to work with external libraries and structure your own projects in a modular and reusable way. You will be well-equipped to generate native build scripts for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, simplify and refactor projects using CMake, and port projects to CMake.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Introduction

There are plenty of existing libraries that excel at very specific tasks. It's generally a very good idea to reuse such libraries in our own codebases, because we can rely on years of experience from other groups of experts. As computer architectures and compilers evolve, so do programming languages. Whereas years ago most scientific software was written in Fortran, nowadays C, C++, and interpreted languages – first and foremost Python – are taking the center stage. It is indeed more and more common to integrate code written in a compiled language with bindings to an interpreted language, since it affords the following benefits:

  • End-users can customize and expand the capabilities offered by the code itself to fully suit their needs.
  • One is able to combine the expressiveness of a language such as Python with the performance of a compiled language...