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)

Writing a function to test and set compiler flags

The code for this recipe is available at https://github.com/dev-cafe/cmake-cookbook/tree/v1.0/chapter-07/recipe-03 and has a C/C++ example. The recipe is valid with CMake version 3.5 (and higher) and has been tested on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

In the previous two recipes, we used macros; in this recipe, we will use a function to abstract away details and avoid code repetition. In the example, we will implement a function that accepts a list of compiler flags. The function will try to compile a test code with these flags, one by one, and return the first flag that was understood by the compiler. By doing so, we will learn a couple of new features: functions, list manipulations, string manipulations, and checking whether compiler flags are supported by the compiler.

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