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

Defining, discovering, and running tests

Testing is the staple diet for any software engineer who takes pride in quality software. The number of frameworks for writing unit tests in the various languages is huge and, especially for C++, CMake includes modules to work with most of the more popular ones.

At very abstract levels, all unit testing frameworks do the following:

  • Allow the formulating and grouping of test cases.
  • Contain some form of assertion to check for various test conditions.
  • Discover and run the test cases, either altogether or a selection of them.
  • Produce the test result in a variety of formats, such as plain text, JSON, XML, and possibly more.

With the CTest utility, CMake includes a built-in way to execute almost any test. Any CMake project that has set enable_testing() and added at least one test with add_test() has testing support enabled. Any call to enable_testing() will enable test discovery in the current directory and any directory...