You're reading from CMake Best Practices Upgrade your C++ builds with CMake for maximum efficiency and scalability

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2024

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781835880647

Length 356 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

C++

Tools

Cmake

Concepts

Application Development

Authors (2):

Mustafa Kemal Gilor

Dominik Berner

View More author details

Table of Contents (22) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1 – The Basics

2. Chapter 1: Kickstarting CMake FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Accessing CMake in the Best Ways

4. Chapter 3: Creating a CMake Project

5. Part 2 – Practical CMake – Getting Your Hands Dirty with CMake

6. Chapter 4: Packaging, Deploying, and Installing a CMake Project

7. Chapter 5: Integrating Third-Party Libraries and Dependency Management

8. Chapter 6: Automatically Generating Documentation

9. Chapter 7: Seamlessly Integrating Code Quality Tools with CMake

10. Chapter 8: Executing Custom Tasks with CMake

11. Chapter 9: Creating Reproducible Build Environments

12. Chapter 10: Handling Distributed Repositories and Dependencies in a Super-Build

13. Chapter 11: Creating Software for Apple Systems

14. Part 3 – Mastering the Details

15. Chapter 12: Cross-Platform-Compiling Custom Toolchains

16. Chapter 13: Reusing CMake Code

17. Chapter 14: Optimizing and Maintaining CMake Projects

18. Chapter 15: Migrating to CMake

19. Index

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20. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Contributing to CMake and Further Reading Material

Getting the dependencies as source code

There are several ways to get dependencies as sources into your project. A relatively straightforward but dangerous way is to manually download or clone them into a subfolder inside your project and then add this folder with add_subdirectory. While this works and is fast, it quickly becomes tedious and hard to maintain. So, this should be automated as soon as possible.

The practice of downloading and integrating a copy of third-party software directly into a product is called vendoring. While it has the advantage that it often makes building software easy, it creates issues with packaging libraries. Vendoring is avoided by either using a package manager or by installing third-party software into a location on your system.

Downloading dependencies as the source using pure CMake

At the base of getting external content is the CMake ExternalProject module and the more sophisticated FetchContent module, which is built on ExternalProject...