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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Chapter 6: Linking with CMake

You might think that after we have successfully compiled the source code into a binary file, our job as build engineers is done. That's almost the case – binary files contain all the code for a CPU to execute, but the code is scattered across multiple files in a very complex way. Linking is a process that simplifies things and makes machine code neat and quick to consume.

A quick glance at the list of commands will tell you that CMake doesn't provide that many related to linking. Admittedly, target_link_libraries() is the only one that actually configures this step. Why dedicate a whole chapter to a single command then? Unfortunately, almost nothing is ever easy in computer science, and linking is no exception.

To achieve the correct results, we need to follow the whole story – understand how exactly a linker works and get the basics right. We'll talk about the internal structure of object files, how the relocation and...