CMake Best Practices

Explore a compendium of tips, tricks, and techniques for leveraging CMake and empowering your software development workflow.

Key Features

• Understand what CMake is, how it works, and how to interact with it
• Discover how to properly create and maintain well-structured CMake projects
• Explore tools and techniques to get the most out of your CMake project

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Get to grips with architecting a well-structured CMake project
• Modularize and reuse CMake code across projects
• Integrate various tools for static analysis, linting, formatting, and documentation into a CMake project
• Get hands-on with performing cross-platform builds
• Discover how you can easily use different toolchains with CMake
• Get started with crafting a well-defined and portable build environment for your project

Who this book is for

This book is for software engineers and build system maintainers working with C or C++ on a regular basis and trying to use CMake to better effect for their everyday tasks. Basic C++ and general programming knowledge will help you to better understand the examples covered in the book.

Table of Contents

1. Kickstarting CMake
2. Accessing CMake in Best Ways
3. Creating a CMake Project
4. Packaging, Deploying and Installing a CMake Project Effortlessly
5. Integrating Third- Party Libraries and Dependency Management
6. Automatically Generating Documentation with CMake
7. Seamless Integration of Code Quality Tools with CMake
8. Executing Custom Tasks with CMake
9. Creating Reproducible Build Environments
10. Handling Distributed Repositories and Dependencies in a Super-build
11. Automated Fuzzing with CMake
12. Cross-Platform-Compiling Custom Toolchains
13. Reusing CMake Code
14. Optimizing and Maintaining CMake Projects
15. Migrating to CMake
16. Contributing to CMake and Further Reading Material

Dominik Berner is a software engineer, blogger and conference speaker with 20 years of professional software development under his belt. He codes mainly in C++ and has worked on many software projects, from writing bleeding edge software for surgical simulators in a startup, over maintaining large legacy platforms for large corporations in the MedTech industry to creating IoT solutions for companies in between. He beliefs that well designed and maintained build environments are one of the key elements to enable teams to write software efficiently and excel at creating quality software. When he is not writing code, he occasionally writes articles for his blog or speaks at conferences about software development.

Mustafa is an experienced professional working in performance-critical software development for the telecommunication, defense industries, and open-source software. His expertise is in high-performance and scalable software design, network technologies, DevOps, and software architecture. His interest in computers emerged very early on in his childhood. He learned programming to hack MMORPG games at around the age of 12, and he has been writing software ever since. His favorite programming language is C++, and he enjoys doing framework design & system programming. He is also a strong advocate of CMake; he maintained many codebases and ported many legacy projects to CMake throughout his career.