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

Creating a simple library

Creating a library works similarly to creating an executable, although there are a few additional things to consider since library targets are usually used by other targets, either in the same project or by other projects. Since libraries usually have an internal part and a publicly visible API, we must take this into account when adding files to the project.

A simple project for a library will look like this:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.21)
project(
  ch3.hello_lib
  VERSION 1.0
  DESCRIPTION
    "A simple C++ project to demonstrate creating executables 
      and libraries in CMake"
  LANGUAGES CXX)
add_library(hello)
target_sources(
  hello
  PRIVATE src/hello.cpp src/internal.cpp)
target_compile_features(hello PUBLIC cxx_std_17)
target_include_directories(
  hello
  PRIVATE src/hello
  PUBLIC...