Book Image

CMake Best Practices

By : Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor
5 (2)
Book Image

CMake Best Practices

5 (2)
By: Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor

Overview of this book

CMake is a powerful tool used to perform a wide variety of tasks, so finding a good starting point for learning CMake is difficult. This book cuts to the core and covers the most common tasks that can be accomplished with CMake without taking an academic approach. While the CMake documentation is comprehensive, it is often hard to find good examples of how things fit together, especially since there are lots of dirty hacks and obsolete solutions available on the internet. This book focuses on helping you to tie things together and create clean and maintainable projects with CMake. You'll not only get to grips with the basics but also work through real-world examples of structuring large and complex maintainable projects and creating builds that run in any programming environment. You'll understand the steps to integrate and automate various tools for improving the overall software quality, such as testing frameworks, fuzzers, and automatic generation of documentation. And since writing code is only half of the work, the book also guides you in creating installers and packaging and distributing your software. All this is tailored to modern development workflows that make heavy use of CI/CD infrastructure. By the end of this CMake book, you'll be able to set up and maintain complex software projects using CMake in the best way possible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics
5
Part 2: Practical CMake – Getting Your Hands Dirty with CMake
14
Part 3: Mastering the Details

Summary

One of the main strengths of CMake is its versatility to build software using a variety of toolchains for a large number of platforms. The downside of this is that it sometimes can be hard for developers to find a working configuration for software. But by supplying CMake presets, containers, and sysroots, it often gets easier to get started with a CMake project.

In this chapter, we looked in detail into how to define CMake presets to define working configuration setups, along with creating build and test definitions. Then, we briefly covered how to create a Docker container and how to invoke CMake commands within, before closing the chapter with a brief look into sysroots and toolchain files. More about toolchains and sysroots will be covered in Chapter 12, Cross-Platform Compiling and Custom Toolchains.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to work with big, distributed projects as super builds. There, you will learn how to handle different versions and how to assemble...