gonium.net » autohell http://gonium.net/md so much time, so little to do. Sat, 11 Sep 2010 16:42:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Code Kata: Project Euler #2 with CMake http://gonium.net/md/2008/04/06/code-kata-project-euler-2-with-cmake/ http://gonium.net/md/2008/04/06/code-kata-project-euler-2-with-cmake/#comments Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:41:35 +0000 md http://gonium.net/md/2008/04/06/code-kata-project-euler-2-with-cmake/ Recently, I started to use the autotools for building a project. But I am really unhappy with it – although a lot of special cases can be handled by the toolchain, it is extremely complex to use and prone to user errors. Auto-Hell, I guess… So, this code kata is dedicated to the alternative CMake package. I have written a simple C++ program to solve problem #2 of Project Euler. The autotools toolchain attempts to solve two problems:
  • Configuration: On the compile system, where do libraries etc live?
  • Build: How is the software built?
The configuration step is the famous “./configure” everyone comes across when installing software on unix systems. The autotools employ a mix of SH, Commandline-Magic, M4 and fairy dust to handle this. It generates Makefiles so that one can use make to build the software. Additional make targets such as make dist or make install help during deployment of the software. The problem lies in the complexity of the toolchain: in the mixture of tools that build upon other tools, M4 macros and shell scripts, it is extremely difficult to find errors. If your buildsystem is as complex as the software you’re developing, something is wrong. In addition, the autotools are not really portable to other systems such as windows, at least not straightforward. For these reasons the KDE project moved away from the autotools. They evaluated many different buildsystems and choose CMake. I played a little bit with it and I am quite happy. Of course, one needs to asses such a system in a bigger scenario in order to judge it, but at a first glance it really does the trick. There are plenty of articles around – to get you started I suggest Tanner Lovelace’s introduction. In addition, the following resources are helpful: But now, on to building the software. My project directory has the following structure: . |-- CMakeLists.txt |-- Makefile |-- Modules/ | `-- FindLog4Cxx.cmake |-- common/ | |-- CMakeLists.txt | |-- common.h | `-- config.h.in |-- problem2/ | |-- CMakeLists.txt | |-- problem2.cpp | `-- problem2.hpp |-- src/ | |-- CMakeLists.txt | `-- main.cpp `-- timer/ |-- CMakeLists.txt |-- clock.cpp `-- clock.hpp In order to keep things interesting I moved the code for solving the Project Euler task to the problem2 library. There’s a common library that defines project-wide settings. In timer, there’s a little routine for measuring execution times. The main routine lives in the src directory. The CMakeList.txt files define the tasks to be done by CMake – this can be seen as the equivalent to the Makefile.am files. But you can define much more stuff in there. Here’s the top-level CMakeList.txt file: # Define project name and version numbers. project (PROBLEM2) set(V_MAJOR 0) set(V_MINOR 1) set(V_PATCH 1) # add a path where some libraries might be stored set(CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH ${CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH} /opt/local/include) set(CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH ${CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH} /opt/local/lib) # look for the external log4cxx library set(LOG4CXX_FIND_REQUIRED true) include(modules/FindLog4Cxx.cmake) OPTION(ENABLE_LOGGING “Build the project with logging enabled” ON) if(ENABLE_LOGGING) message(STATUS “Building with logging enabled.”) endif(ENABLE_LOGGING) # Make sure all subdirectories include correctly include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}) # process the subdirectories in the right order. add_subdirectory (common) add_subdirectory (problem2) add_subdirectory (timer) add_subdirectory (src) I wanted to create a template which can be used as a staring point for later projects. I tend to use the Apache Log4CXX library for producing log messages. In order to discover the include and library directories, I created a CMake module – the equivalent of an Autotools M4 macro. CMake comes with lots of example modules for detecting libraries. But it is also easy to write your own modules. In contrast to the Autotools, all modules are specified in CMake’s own language. Typically, you want to be able to deactivate all logging during the build process, e.g. prior to shipping the release version. You can define Options which can be set with various GUI tools. On Unix platforms, a curses-based GUI allows you to select your options. In this example, the ENABLE_LOGGING variable gets processed by the CMakeList.txt in the common directory: set(lib_src config.h common.h) # create autotools-like config.h file from template. config.h will be # generated in the build directory – add a global include so that we can # find the config.h. In addition, copy the header-only common.h file to # the build tree. configure_file(config.h.in ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/config.h) configure_file(common.h ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/common.h COPYONLY) This generates a config.h file and copies it to the right location in the build directory. The config.h.in file defines some variables that will be replaced based on the values determined by CMake during the build step. Altogether, I like CMake. It is as powerful as the Autotools but without the quirks of the latter. You can download the example from the download page. There are other tools in the CMake package, namely CTest for testing software – but I’ll save this for another sunday ;-) Finally, the Project Euler task is to solve the following problem:
Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, … Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.
The code to solve this problem is pretty easy: unsigned long long sum, tmp = 1; current = 2; previous = 1; while (current < _max) { if (current % 2 == 0) sum += current; tmp=current; current = current + previous; previous = tmp; } The heaven or hell picture was CC'ed by karmablue. ]]> http://gonium.net/md/2008/04/06/code-kata-project-euler-2-with-cmake/feed/ 0