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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Summary

This chapter wraps up our long journey through CMake. Now you fully understand what problems CMake aims to solve and which steps are necessary to automate these solutions.

In the first three chapters, we explored all the basics: what CMake is and how users leverage it to bring raw source code to life, what the key components of CMake are, and what purpose different project files have. We explained the syntax of CMake: comments, command invocation, arguments, variables, and control structures. We've discovered how modules and subprojects work, what the correct project structure is, and how to work with various platforms and toolchains.

The second part of the book taught us about building with CMake: how to use targets, custom commands, build types, and generator expressions. We dove deep into the technicalities of compilation, and the configuration of a preprocessor and an optimizer. We discussed linking and introduced different library types. Then, we investigated...