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

Requirements and prerequisites for a super-build

Super-builds can be structured as a grand build that builds multiple projects or as an in-project submodule that deals with dependencies. Therefore, having the means of acquiring repositories is a must. Fortunately, CMake has stable and established ways of doing so. To name a few, ExternalProject and FetchContent are the most popular CMake modules for dealing with external dependencies. We will be using the FetchContent CMake module in our examples, since it is cleaner and easier to deal with. Please note that using the means provided by CMake is not a strict requirement but a convenience. A super-build can also be structured by using version control system utilities, such as git submodule or git subtree. Since CMake is this book's focal point and Git support for FetchContent is quite decent, we prefer to utilize it.

That's it for now. Let's continue with learning about building a project that spans multiple code repositories...