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

In this chapter, we have learned how to structure a CMake project to support reusability. We have learned how to implement the CMake utility modules, how to share them, and how to use utility modules written by others. Having the ability to leverage CMake modules enables us to better organize our projects and better collaborate with our team members in unison. CMake projects will be much easier to maintain with this knowledge on hand. The common, reusable code between CMake projects will grow into an extensive collection of useful modules that makes writing projects with CMake easier.

I want to remind you that CMake is a scripting language and should be treated as such. Use software design principles and patterns to make CMake code more maintainable. Organize your CMake code into functions and modules. Reuse and share the CMake code as much as possible. Please do not neglect your build system code, or you may have to write it from scratch.

In the next chapter, we will...