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

Creating dependency graphs of CMake targets

In the previous sections, we have been covering the documentation and graphing of the software code, but in a large project, we may also need to document and visualize the CMake code as well. The relations between CMake targets may be complex, and this may render keeping track of all the dependencies hard. Fortunately, CMake can again help with this by providing a graph showing all dependencies between targets. By calling cmake --graphviz=my-project.dot /path/to/build/dir, CMake will create files in the DOT language that contain how targets depend on each other.

The DOT language is a description language for graphs and can be interpreted by a multitude of programs, the most famous one being the freely available Graphviz. DOT files can be converted to images or even Portable Document Format (PDF) files using the dot command-line utility from Graphviz, like this: dot -Tpng filename.dot -o out.png.

Running these commands for the example...