Using Modern CMake with Qt
25.05.2020
KDAB’s Kevin Funk presented Using Modern CMake with Qt at Qt Virtual Tech Con last month.
He reported that the Qt Company did a great job moderating the sessions at this event, and there was a lively Q&A at the end – Kevin had to pick from about 60 questions, so this is a hot topic.
Now the event is over you can access Kevin’s talk here, including the answers he had time for, and also his slides, below the abstract.
Using Modern CMake with Qtwith Kevin Funk
Prerequisite: No prior CMake experience required
CMake is a cross-platform build system, with powerful APIs for finding dependencies of various or specific versions, and with many abstractions for platforms, compilers, other build systems, and dependencies.
The next major Qt version, Qt6, will be using CMake internally as its build system, so the CMake integration with Qt will likely get tighter and more versatile in the long-term.
In this talk, we’ll be introducing Qt specific CMake functionalities, in order to find and use Qt5 inside your personal CMake-based project, using modern CMake capabilities. We are going to discuss how to find Qt installs using CMake’s find_package function and how to find specific Qt versions when multiple versions are installed.
Further than that, useful CMake variables such as CMAKE_INCLUDE_CURRENT_DIR, CMAKE_AUTOMOC, CMAKE_AUTORCC, and CMAKE_AUTOUIC will be explained in detail and how the use of the CMake integrations can speed up the build drastically.
Last but not least some of the additional supplied Qt related CMake functions, such as for big resources or translation support will be discussed.
Target audience: Build Engineers or Software Engineers who would like to know more about using Qt under CMake.
Download Kevin’s slides: QTVTC20 – Using Modern CMake – Kevin Funk
About Kevin Funk
Kevin has actively developed with Qt/C++ since 2006 and has a special interest in tooling and profiling. He’s an active contributor to KDAB’s GammaRay analyzer (a high-level Qt application debugger) and has a strong emphasis on state machine tooling. He is a co-maintainer of the KDevelop IDE, a powerful C/C++ development environment backed by Clang, and is pushing for cross-platform success inside KDE. Kevin holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science.
Download Kevin’s whitepaper on CMake and Qt…