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 13: Reusing CMake Code

Writing build system code for a project is no easy task. Project maintainers and developers are spending a lot of effort on writing CMake code for configuring compiler flags, project build variants, third-party libraries, and tool integrations. Writing CMake code for project-agnostic details from scratch may start to incur a significant burden when dealing with multiple CMake projects. Most of the CMake code written for a project to configure the aforementioned details could be reused between the projects. With that in mind, it is for our benefit to develop a strategy to make our CMake code reuse-friendly. The straightforward way to approach this problem is to treat CMake code as regular code and apply some of the most basic coding principles: the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle and the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).

CMake code can be easily reused if structured with reusability in mind. Achieving essential reusability is pretty...