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 package managers with CMake

The easiest way to get dependencies into your project is to regularly install them using apt-get, brew, or Chocolatey. The downside of installing everything is that you can pollute your system with many different versions of libraries and the version you are looking for might not be available at all. This is especially true if you are working on multiple projects with different requirements regarding the dependencies side by side. Often, a developer downloads the dependencies locally for each project so that each project can work independently. A very good way to handle dependencies is by using package managers such as Conan or vcpkg.

Using a dedicated package manager has many advantages when it comes to dependency management. Two of the more popular ones for handling C++ dependencies are Conan and vcpkg. Both of them can handle complex build systems, and mastering them will require whole books on their own, so we will only cover the bare necessities...