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 12, Cross-Platform-Compiling Custom Toolchains

  1. Toolchain files are passed either by the --toolchain command-line flag, the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE variable, or with the toolchainFile option in a CMake preset.
  2. Usually, the following things are done in a toolchain file for cross-compiling:
    1. Defining the target system and architecture
    2. Providing paths to any tools needed to build the software
    3. Setting default flags for the compiler and linkers
    4. Pointing to the sysroot and possibly any staging directory if cross-compiling
    5. Setting hints for the search order for any find_ commands of CMake
  3. The staging directory is set with the CMAKE_STAGING_PREFIX variable and is used as a place to install any built artifacts if the sysroot should not be modified.
  4. The emulator command is passed as a semicolon-separated list in the CMAKE_CROSSCOMPILING_EMULATOR variable.
  5. Any call to project() or enable_language() in a project will trigger detection of the features.
  6. The configuration...