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

Bringing it together – using your libraries

So far, we have created three different libraries – a binary library to be linked either statically or dynamically, an interface or header-only library, and a precompiled but not linked object library.

Let's learn how to use them in an executable in a shared project. Installing them as system libraries or using them as external dependencies will be covered in Chapter 5, Integrating Third-Party Libraries and Dependency Management.

So, we can either put the add_library calls in the same CMakeLists.txt file or we can integrate them by using add_subdirectory. Both are valid options and depend on how the project is set up, as described in the Setting up a project and Working with nested projects sections of this chapter.

In the following example, we're assuming that three libraries have been defined with CMakeLists.txt files in the hello_lib, hello_header_only, and hello_object directories. These libraries can...