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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Thinking about the project structure

It's no secret that as a project grows, it becomes harder and harder to find things in it – both in listfiles and in the source code. Therefore, it is very important to maintain the project hygiene right from the get-go.

Imagine a scenario where you need to deliver some important, time-sensitive changes, and they don't fit well in either of the two directories in your project. Now, you need to quickly push a cleanup commit that introduces more directories and another level of hierarchy for your files so that your changes can have a nice place to fit. Or (what's worse), you decide to just shove them anywhere and create a ticket to deal with the issue later.

Over the course of the year, these tickets accumulate, the technical debt grows, and so does the cost of maintaining the code. This becomes extremely troublesome when there's a crippling bug in a live system that needs a quick fix and when people unfamiliar with...