Book Image

Modern CMake for C++

By : Rafał Świdziński
5 (2)
Book Image

Modern CMake for C++

5 (2)
By: Rafał Świdziński

Overview of this book

Creating top-notch software is an extremely difficult undertaking. Developers researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices. At the same time, most online resources offer limited explanation, while also lacking the proper context and structure. This book offers a simpler, more comprehensive, experience as it treats the subject of building C++ solutions holistically. Modern CMake for C++ is an end-to-end guide to the automatization of complex tasks, including building, testing, and packaging. You'll not only learn how to use the CMake language in CMake projects, but also discover what makes them maintainable, elegant, and clean. The book also focuses on the structure of source directories, building targets, and packages. As you progress, you’ll learn how to compile and link executables and libraries, how those processes work, and how to optimize builds in CMake for the best results. You'll understand how to use external dependencies in your project – third-party libraries, testing frameworks, program analysis tools, and documentation generators. Finally, you'll get to grips with exporting, installing, and packaging for internal and external purposes. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use CMake confidently on a professional level.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing CMake
5
Section 2: Building With CMake
10
Section 3: Automating With CMake

Using CTest to standardize testing in CMake

Ultimately, automated testing involves nothing other than running an executable that sets your system under test (or SUT) in a given state, performs tested operations, and checks if the results match expectations. You can think of them as a codified way of filling the blanks in the sentence "GIVEN _ WHEN _ THEN _" and checking if it's true for SUT. As you can imagine, there's more than one way of doing this—actually, there are lots. Everything depends on the kind of framework you're going to use, how you are hooking it up to your SUT, and what is the exact configuration. Even things as minuscule as the filename of your testing binary will impact the experience of the person using your software. As there are no agreed-upon standards to these things, one developer will use the name test_my_app, another will go with unit_tests, and a third will use something obscure or not provide tests at all. Discovering which...