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

Chapter 7: Seamlessly Integrating Code Quality Tools with CMake

So far, we have focused on building and installing projects, as well as generating documentation and handling external dependencies. Another major task when writing quality software is testing and ensuring that the code quality is at the desired level by various other means. To achieve a high code quality, just writing unit tests and executing them once in a while is no longer enough. If you want to produce high-quality software, having proper test tools that integrate easily with your build system is not a luxury but a necessity. Only if building and testing work effortlessly together can the programmers focus on writing good tests instead of focusing on getting those tests to run. Methods such as test-driven development bring huge value to the software quality.

But, it is not just writing plain tests that increase the quality. Writing good tests is one thing; checking the effectiveness of the tests with coverage...