As I mentioned in Where’s The Code, I will be posting code from this blog up on a Google code svn server. You may notice a new sidebar, which contains the information you’ll need to retrieve the code.

I’d also like to point out that all of the projects I’ll be presenting here will be using CMake for its build system. Even if you have no plans to download the code I present here, I strongly recommend you check CMake out. It’s very powerful, but much easier to deal with then plain Makefiles, and definitely less of a hassle than the GNU Autotools, especially for Windows users. In a nutshell, you create some build configuration files, just like with every other build system. Then you run your project through the CMake tool, and it will generate a project for your native build system - be it make, Xcode, Visual Studio, etc.

The creators of CMake strongly recommend that you perform “out-of-source” builds. In other words, your build results, intermediate files, and anything else that the build process generates goes into a totally separate directory from your source files. For people used to using an IDE, this is probably nothing shocking. But, while Autotools and make and allow you to do this, it’s not necessarily obvious how, and it seems that few people do it. Since CMake makes it so stupidly easy, I don’t see a reason not to follow the recommendation, and tons of reasons to follow it. For one thing, it just keeps your source directory nice and clean. Just check out the Running CMake documentation.

One final note. Most all of the code I post here is cross-platform, and I’ve tested it on OS X, Windows XP, and Linux. There will be exceptions, which I will note when I post.

With all that said, I’ll be introducing our first project shortly…

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