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

Summary

Maintaining high software quality is a huge and complex task, and today, there is such a multitude of tools and techniques to test software that it can be hard to keep an overview. With the techniques and the tools described in this chapter, we hope to have given a brief overview of the most common tasks and tools used in modern C++ development. CTest and CMake can help orchestrate the various kinds of tests to get the most out of the tools. In this chapter, you've seen how tests can be defined and run, how to execute them in parallel, and how to manage test resources. We've gone over how to define test fixtures and how to define advanced ways to determine whether a test succeeded or failed based on its output.

We have illustrated how to set up code coverage reports using Gcov and how to define custom build types to pass the needed compiler flags. We've looked at how various tools for static code analysis can be included in CMake projects and how the sanitizers...