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 15, Migrating to CMake

  1. Large projects can be migrated from the top down or the bottom up.
  2. When working with a bottom-up approach, those projects or targets with the most incoming dependencies should be migrated first.
  3. When choosing a top-down approach, the projects with the least incoming dependencies should be migrated first.
  4. Top-down approaches quickly allow you to build the whole project using CMake as an entry point. Additionally, for each migrated project, the old build system can be discarded when the project is done. The downside is that a top-down approach will require some intermediate code.
  5. A bottom-up approach will require less intermediate code than a top-down approach and allow for clean CMake code right from the start. The downside is that the full project can only be built when all of the subprojects have been migrated.