A Modern C++ Project Setup

This repository contains an example project for C++ development. It is not meant to be exhaustive but gathers several useful tools in an initial setup.

Contributions are welcome.

Dev Container

The project contains configuration for Visual Studio Code to use a development container https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

The container contains several pre-requisites in order to build the project, see install-prerequisites. All the tools used in this repository will be available in this container.

Conan

Conan is a dependency and package manager for C and C++ languages, https://docs.conan.io/2/introduction.html

Dependencies

Dependencies can be added to the conanfile.txt https://docs.conan.io/2/reference/conanfile_txt.html

[requires]
onetbb/2021.3.0

[options]
onetbb/*:shared=True

[tool_requires]
cmake/3.28.1
ninja/1.11.1

and packages are by default fetched from Conan Center https://conan.io/center.

Profiles

In order to define various settings of the required packages, profiles can be used. The example below requires a package built with clang-18, on Linux x86_64 with C++ 20 standard in Release.

[buildenv]
CC=/usr/bin/clang-18
CXX=/usr/bin/clang++-18


[settings]
arch=x86_64
compiler=clang
compiler.cppstd=20
compiler.libcxx=libstdc++
compiler.version=18
os=Linux
build_type=Release

See https://docs.conan.io/2/reference/config_files/profiles.html for details.

CCache

Ccache (https://ccache.dev) is a compiler cache that speeds up recompilation of previously built compilation units. The local cache directory is set to .ccache and is mounted in the container such that it persists over restarts of the container.

Clang Format

ClangFormat allows to consistently format source. The exact style can be configured using a .clang-format file in the source directory. For further information see https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html.

VS Code can be configured to format on save using the same configuration.

Clang Tidy

clang-tidy is a clang-based C++ “linter” tool. Its purpose is to provide an extensible framework for diagnosing and fixing typical programming errors, like style violations, interface misuse, or bugs that can be deduced via static analysis.

The applied rules can be configured using a .clang-tidy file in the source directory. For further information see https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy

The setup in this repository includes a cache for clang tidy.

dev@ubuntu22:/workspace$ ./run-clang-tidy.sh

Clangd

From https://clangd.llvm.org:

clangd is a language server that can work with many editors via a plugin https://clangd.llvm.org.

clangd runs the clang compiler on your code as you type, and shows diagnostics of errors and warnings in-place.

clangd embeds clang-tidy which provides extra hints about code problems: bug-prone patterns, performance traps, and style issues.

Building using CMake

1. Install dependendencies with a specified profile while building packages that cannot be found locally or in the remotes.

dev@ubuntu22:/workspace$ conan install . --output-folder=build --profile=profiles/ubuntu-22.04.clang.release.conan-profile --build=missing

2. Configuring using Ninja, clang and the conan

dev@ubuntu22:/workspace$ cd build

dev@ubuntu22:/workspace/build$ cmake ../src -G Ninja -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=conan_toolchain.cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++-18

Note: Add '-DCCACHE=OFF' to disable the compiler cache. Default is ON.

3. Build, install and package

# build with 4 parallel jobs
dev@ubuntu22:/workspace/build$ cmake --build . -j 4
# installing the binaries, shared libraries and headers
dev@ubuntu22:/workspace/build$ cmake --install . --prefix=./install 
# Creates a PROJECTNAME-***.tar.gz with the binaries and libraries inside
dev@ubuntu22:/workspace/build$ cpack