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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Chapter 12: Creating Your Professional Project

We gathered all the required knowledge to build professional projects; we learned about structuring, building, dependency management, testing, analyzing, installing, and packaging. It's time to put these acquired skills into practice by creating a coherent, professional project.

The important thing to understand is that even trivial programs will benefit from automated quality checks and a streamlined end-to-end process that turns raw code into a fully fledged solution. It's true that this is often a considerable investment, as many steps need to be taken in order to prepare everything right – even more so if we're trying to add these mechanisms to already existing code bases (usually, they're already large and convoluted).

That's the very reason to use CMake from the get-go and set all the piping upfront; not only it will be easier to configure but, more importantly, it's also much more efficient...