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researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices.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

Writing your own find-modules

On a rare occasion, the library that you really want to use in your project doesn't provide a config-file or a PkgConfig file, and there's no find-module readily available in CMake already. You can then write a custom find-module for that library and ship it with your project. This situation is not ideal, but in the interest of taking care of the users of your project, it has to be done.

Since we have already become familiar with libpqxx in the previous section, let's write a nice find-module for it. We start by writing in a new FindPQXX.cmake file, which we'll store in the cmake/module directory of our project source tree. We need to make sure that the find-module gets discovered by the CMake when find_package() is called, so we'll add this path to the CMAKE_MODULE_PATH variable in our CMakeLists.txt with list(APPEND). The whole list file should look like this:

chapter07/04-find-package-custom/CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required...