The recipes in this chapter will walk you through fairly basic tasks needed to build your code: compiling an executable, compiling a library, performing build actions based on user input, and so forth. CMake is a build system generator particularly suited to being platform- and compiler-independent. We have striven to show this aspect in this chapter. Unless stated otherwise, all recipes are independent of the operating system; they can be run without modifications on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
The recipes in this book are mainly designed for C++ projects and demonstrated using C++ examples, but CMake can be used for projects in other languages, including C and Fortran. For any given recipe and whenever it makes sense, we have tried to include examples in C++, C, and Fortran. In this way, you will be able to choose the recipe in your favorite flavor. Some recipes...