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

Broad support for cross-compiling is one of the striking features of CMake. In this chapter, we looked into how to define a toolchain file for cross-compiling and how to use sysroots to use libraries for a different target platform. A special case of cross-compiling is Android and Apple mobile devices, which rely on their specific SDKs. With a brief excursion into using emulators or simulators for testing for other platforms, you will have all the essential information to start building quality software for various target platforms.

The last part of the chapter concerned itself with the advanced topic of testing toolchains for certain features. While most projects will not have to concern themselves with these details, they are nevertheless useful to know.

The next chapter will be about making CMake code reusable across multiple projects without the need to rewrite all the things again and again.