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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Working with variables

Variables in CMake are a surprisingly complex subject. Not only are there three categories of variables – normal, cache, and environment – but they also reside in different scopes, with specific rules on how one scope affects the other. Very often, a poor understanding of all these rules becomes a source of bugs and headaches. I recommend you study this section with care and make sure you understand all of concepts before moving on.

Let's start with some key facts about variables in CMake:

  • Variable names are case-sensitive and can include almost any character.
  • All variables are stored internally as strings, even if some commands can interpret them as values of other data types (even lists!).
  • The basic variable manipulation commands are set() and unset(), but there are other commands that can affect variables, such as string() and list().

To set a variable, we simply call set(), providing its name and the value:

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