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

Profiling a CMake build

When CMake projects get big, configuring them might take quite a long time, especially if there is external content loaded or if there are lots of checks done for toolchain features. A first step to optimize this is to check what part of the configuration process takes up how much time. Since version 3.18, CMake includes command-line options to produce nice profiling graphs to investigate where the time is spent during configuration. By adding the --profiling-output and --profiling-format profiling flags, CMake will create profiling output. At the time of writing this book, only the Google trace format for the output format is supported. Despite this, the format and the file need to be specified to create the profiling information. A call to CMake to create a profiling graph could look like this:

cmake -S <sourceDir> -B <buildDir> --profiling-output 
./profiling.json --profiling-format=google-trace

This will write the profiling output to the...