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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Providing the documentation

The final element of a professional project is, of course, the documentation. It comes in two categories:

  • Technical documentation (interfaces, designs, classes, and files)
  • General documentation (all other not-as-technical documents)

As we saw in Chapter 10, Generating Documentation, a lot of technical documentation can be generated automatically with CMake by using Doxygen.

Automatic documentation generation

A thing to mention: some projects generate documentation during the build stage and package it with the rest of the project. It's a matter of preference. For this project, we have decided not to do so. You might have a good reason to choose otherwise (such as hosting the documentation online).

Figure 12.7 shows the overview of the execution flow that is used in this process:

Figure 12.7 – Files used to generate documentation

To generate documentation for our targets, we'll create...