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It doesn't really matter if your solution is large or small; as it grows, you'll likely choose to rely on other projects. Avoiding the effort of creating and maintaining boilerplate code is crucial. This frees up your time for what truly matters: the business logic. External dependencies serve multiple purposes. They offer frameworks and features, solve complex issues, and play a key role in building and ensuring code quality. These dependencies can vary, ranging from specialized compilers like Protobuf to testing frameworks like GTest.
When working with open-source projects or in-house code, managing external dependencies efficiently is essential. Doing this manually would require a lot of setup time and ongoing support. Luckily, CMake excels at handling various approaches to dependency management while staying current with industry standards.
We will first learn how to identify and utilize dependencies already...