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

Supplying configuration information for others using your project

In the previous section, we learned how to make our project installable so that others can consume our project by installing it on their system. But sometimes, delivering the artifacts is not enough. For example, if you are delivering a library, it must also be easy to import it into a project – especially a CMake project. In this section, we will learn how to make this importing process easier for other CMake projects.

There are convenient ways of importing a library, given that the project to be imported has the proper configuration files. One of the prominent ways of doing so is by utilizing the find_package() method (which we will cover in Chapter 5, Integrating Third-Party Libraries and Dependency Management). If you have consumers that are using CMake in their workflows, they will be happy if they can just write find_package(your_project_name) and start using your code. In this section, we will learn...