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

Chapter 12: Cross-Platform Compiling and Custom Toolchains

One of the powerful features of CMake is its support for the cross-platform building of software. Simply said, this means that with CMake, a project from any platform can be built for any other platform, as long as the necessary tools are available on the system running CMake. When building software, we typically talk about compilers and linkers, and they are of course essential tools for building software, but on a closer look, there are often some other tools, libraries, and files involved when building software. Collectively, these are commonly known as toolchains in CMake.

So far in this book, all the examples were built for the same system CMake was running on. In these cases, CMake usually does a pretty good job of finding the correct toolchain to use. However, if the software is to be built for another platform, the toolchain usually has to be specified by the developer. Toolchain definitions might be relatively...