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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Unit-testing frameworks

The previous section proves that it isn't extremely complicated to write a tiny unit-testing driver. It wasn't pretty, but believe it or not, professional developers actually do like to reinvent the wheel (theirs will be fancier, rounder, and faster than the legacy one). Don't fall into this trap: you'll create so much boilerplate that it could become a separate project. Introducing a popular unit-test framework to your solution aligns it to a standard that transcends projects and companies and will get you free updates and extensions for cheap. You can't lose.

How do we add a unit-testing framework to our project? Well, write tests in implementation files according to the chosen framework's rules and link these tests with a test runner provided by the framework. Test runners are your entry points that will start the execution of selected tests. Unlike the basic unit_tests.cpp file we saw earlier in the chapter, many of them...