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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Planning our work

The software we'll be building in this chapter isn't meant to be extremely complex – we'll create a simple calculator that adds two numbers together (Figure 12.1). It will be released as a console application with a text user interface and a library to perform mathematical operations, which can potentially be used in another project. While there isn't much use for such a project in real life, as C++ offers plenty of support for calculations in its standard library, its banality will be perfect to explore how all techniques discussed in this book work together in practice:

Figure 12.1 – The two states of a console calculator's user interface

Usually, projects either produce a user-facing executable or a library for developers. Projects that do both are a bit rarer but not totally uncommon – some applications offer standalone SDKs or libraries supporting the creation of plugins. Another case may...