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

Testing cross-compiled binaries

Being able to effortlessly cross-compile binaries for different architectures adds much convenience to the developer workflows of the people involved, but often, these workflows do not stop at building the binaries but also include running tests. If the software also compiles on the host toolchain and the tests are generic enough, running tests on the host might be the easiest way to test the software, although it might cost some time when switching the toolchains and rebuilding frequently. If this is not possible or too time-consuming, one alternative is of course to run any tests on the real target hardware, but depending on the availability of the hardware and the effort of setting up the tests on the hardware, this might also be rather cumbersome. So, often, a practicable middle way is to run tests inside an emulator for the target platform if this is available.

To define an emulator for running tests, the CROSSCOMPILING_EMULATOR target property...