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

Questions

To reinforce what you have learned in this chapter, try to answer the following questions. If you are having a hard time answering them, go back to the relevant section and re-visit the topic:

  1. Describe how a CMake project can be configured from the CLI in the build folder in the project's root directory with each of the following:
    1. A different C++ compiler, located at /usr/bin/clang++
    2. A Ninja generator
    3. A -Wall compiler flag for the Debug build type
  2. Describe how the project previously configured in Q1 can be built using CMake using the command line with each of the following:
    1. Eight parallel jobs
    2. The --trace option in the Unix Makefiles generator
  3. Describe how the project previously built in Q1 can be installed using CMake using the command line directory/opt/project.
  4. Assuming the CMake-Best-Practices project is already configured and built, which command must be invoked to only install the ch2.libraries component?
  5. What is an advanced variable in...