Using Generator Expressions

Many CMake users don’t encounter generator expressions in their private explorations as they are quite advanced concepts. However, they are crucial for projects that are preparing for the general availability stage, or first release to the wider audience, as they play an important role in exporting, installing, and packaging. If you’re trying to just learn the basics of CMake quickly and focus on the C++ aspect, feel free to skip this chapter for now and return to it later. On the other hand, we discuss generator expressions at this time, because the following chapters will reference this knowledge when explaining the more in-depth aspects of CMake.

We’ll start by introducing the subject of generator expressions: what they are, what their uses are, and how they are formed and expanded. This will be followed by a short presentation of the nesting mechanism and a more thorough description of the conditional expansion, which allows...