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 15: Migrating to CMake

While CMake is evolving into a de facto industry standard for C++ and C projects, there are still projects—sometimes large ones—that use different build systems. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that as long as it fits your needs. However, at some point, and for whatever reason, you might wish to switch to CMake. For instance, maybe the software should be buildable by different IDEs or on different platforms, or the dependency management has become cumbersome. Another common situation is when the repository structure changes from a big mono-repo, where all libraries are checked in, to distributed repositories for each library project. Whatever the reason, migrating to CMake can be a challenge, especially for large projects, but the results could be worth it.

While converting a project in one go would be the preferred way, often, there are non-technical requirements that might not make this possible. For instance, development might...