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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Useful commands

CMake offers many, many scripting commands that allow you to work with variables and the environment. Some of them are covered extensively in the Appendix section, for example, list(), string(), and file() (we'll leave these explanations there and concentrate on projects in the main chapters). Others, such as find_...(), fit better in chapters that talk about managing dependencies. In this section, we'll briefly cover the most useful commands for scripts.

The message() command

We already know and love our trusty message() command, which prints text to standard output. However, there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. By providing a MODE argument, you can customize the style of the output, and in the case of an error, you can stop the execution of the code: message(<MODE> "text").

The recognized modes are as follows:

  • FATAL_ERROR: This stops processing and generation.
  • SEND_ERROR: This continues processing, but skips...