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

Generating documentation from your code

Most people, either knowingly or not, structure their software projects in an organized way. The organization is a positive side effect of methodologies and procedures such as object-oriented (OO) design, programming language rules, personal preference, habits, or dictated by project rules. While rules and conventions tend to be boring, adhering to them results in a more understandable project structure. As we can all agree, organized material is better for both human perception and computers. When procedure, rules, order, and organization exist, the computer can make sense of it. Documentation generation software leverages that fact to our benefit.

We will now introduce you to one of the most prominent documentation generation software for C and C++ programming languages: Doxygen. We will learn how we can integrate Doxygen with CMake to automatically generate documentation for CMake projects.

Up next, the basics of Doxygen await.

Understanding...