Professional CMake:

A Practical Guide

Learn to use CMake effectively with practical advice from a CMake co-maintainer. You can also have the author work directly with your team!

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Month: April 2016

Using ccache with CMake

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Updated 1st February 2017

Working with very large C/C++ code bases will sometimes test your patience. Build times in particular can be a sore point, especially if the development team do not have a great understanding of how to minimise dependencies between source files, headers, etc. The problem gets worse if the developer frequently switches between branches of their source control system, resulting in source files often changing their contents and/or timestamps. The ccache tool aims to minimise that pain by caching compilation outputs (i.e. object files) and reusing them instead of compiling the source again if it gets a compilation request it has seen before and cached. It supports GCC or any compiler that looks like GCC (eg clang). When rebuilding a large project that ccache has mostly compiled before already, the time saving can be significant, even sometimes reducing many minutes down to seconds.

Getting ccache to work with CMake is not overly complicated, but the way to do it is not always obvious. This is especially true with Xcode builds. This article demonstrates how to set up a CMake project to use ccache with Unix Makefiles, Ninja or Xcode generators, with Xcode receiving special attention. The techniques presented do not require any changes to the host system. Specifically, no symlinks need to be set up for ccache, making it suitable for use in CI systems, etc. where the developer may not be in control of how/where ccache is installed.

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Scripting CMake builds

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Sometimes you just want a single way to build a software project, regardless of what platform or build tool you are using. The promise of CMake is that this should be possible, but in practice, it sometimes doesn’t always seem that way. One particular area where this becomes apparent is scripted builds, especially for things like continuous integration systems, automated testing processes, etc. Since each platform typically has its own commonly used build tool and developers tend to be more familiar with that tool than with CMake, the tendency is to invoke that tool directly in scripts. Unfortunately, this means such scripts end up handling each platform’s build tool separately. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This article will address this and a few other smaller details associated with setting up a platform independent scripted CMake build.

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