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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

We introduced a lot of valuable concepts in this chapter that will give us a strong foundation to go forward and build hardened, future-proof projects. We discussed how to set the minimum CMake version and how to configure the key aspects of the project – that is, the name, languages, and metadata fields.

Laying good foundations will help ensure that our projects can grow quickly. This is why we discussed the partitioning of projects. We analyzed naïve code partitioning using include() and compared it with add_subdirectory(). At this point, we learned about the benefits of managing the directory scope of variables, and we explored the use of simpler paths and increased modularity. Having an option to create a nested project and build it separately is very useful when we need to slowly break code down into more independent units.

After an overview of the partitioning mechanisms we have at our disposal, we explored how we want to use them – for example...