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

Building across multiple code repositories

Software projects, either directly or indirectly, span multiple code repositories. Dealing with local project code is the easiest, but software projects are rarely standalone. Things may get complicated really fast without a proper dependency management strategy. The first recommendation of this chapter is to use a package manager if you can. Package managers greatly reduce the effort spent on dependency management. If you are not able to use a package manager, you may need to roll your very own mini project-specific package manager, which is called a super-build.

Super-builds are mostly used for making a project self-sufficient dependency-wise, which means the project is able to satisfy its very own dependencies without the intervention of the user. Having such an ability is very convenient for all consumers. To demonstrate this technique, we will start with an example of such a scenario. Let's begin.

The recommended way –...