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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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 opened the door to actual programming with CMake – you're now able to write great, informative comments and invoke built-in commands, and you understand how to correctly provide all kinds of arguments to them. This knowledge alone will help you understand the unusual syntax of CMake listfiles that you may have seen in other projects.

Next, we covered variables in CMake – specifically, how to reference, set, and unset normal, cache, and environment variables. We took a deep dive into how directory and function scopes work, and we discussed the issues (and their workarounds) relating to nested scopes.

We also covered lists and control structures. We discussed the syntax of conditions, their logical operations, the evaluation of unquoted arguments, and strings and variables. We learned how to compare values, do simple checks, and examine the state of the files in the system. This allows us to write conditional blocks and while loops. And...