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

Static code analysis using CMake

Unit tests, sanitizers, and coverage reports all depend on the code being actually run to detect possible errors. Static code analysis analyzes the code without running it. The good thing about that is that all code that is compiled can be analyzed, not just the parts that are covered by tests. This, of course, also means that different kinds of glitches can be found. A downside of static code analysis is that it can take a very long time to run the tests.

CMake supports several tools for static code analysis that are enabled either by setting a property or a global variable. All of the tools, except link what you use, are external programs that need to be installed and found in the path of the system. Link what you use uses the linker of the system, so no further installation is necessary. The tools supported by CMake are the following:

  • Clang-Tidy is a C++ linter tool covering a wide array of errors, including style violations and interface...