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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Scoping the environment

CMake provides multiple ways of querying the environment with CMAKE_ variables, ENV variables, and special commands. For example, collected information can be used to support cross-platform scripts. These mechanisms allow us to avoid using platform-specific shell commands that may not be easily portable or differ in naming across environments.

For performance-critical applications, it will be useful to know all the features of the destination platform (for example, instruction sets, CPU core count, and more). This information can then be passed to the compiled binaries so that they can be tuned to perfection (we'll learn how to do that in the next chapter). Let's see what information is available in CMake natively.

Discovering the operating system

There are many occasions when it is useful to know what the target operating system is. Even as mundane a thing as a filesystem differs greatly between Windows and Unix in things such as case sensitivity...