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

Using CMake in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Qt Creator

Being a common tool in software development, CMake has integrations with a wide variety of IDEs and source code editors. Using such integrations while using an IDE or editor is perhaps more convenient for the user. In this section, we will cover how CMake integrates with some of the popular IDEs and editors.

If you are expecting a guide about how to use an IDE or editor, this section is not going to be about that. The main focus of this section is to investigate and learn about CMake integrations with such tools. This section assumes that you have existing experience with the IDE/editor you are going to interact with.

Let's start with Visual Studio.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio was one of the latecomers to the party when supporting CMake. Unlike other popular IDEs, Visual Studio had no native support for CMake until the year 2017. In that year, Microsoft decided to make a move and introduced built-in...