Optimizing and Maintaining CMake Projects
Software projects tend to live for a long time, and for some, it’s not unheard of for them to be under more or less active development for a decade or more. But even if projects do not live that long, they tend to grow over time and attract certain clutter and legacy artifacts. Often, maintaining a project does not just mean refactoring code or adding a feature once in a while but also keeping build information and dependencies up to date.
As projects grow in complexity, build times often increase dramatically to the point that development might get tedious because of the long wait times. Long build times are not just inconvenient; they might also encourage developers to take shortcuts because they make trying things out hard. It is hard to try out something new if each build takes hours to complete and if each push to the CI/CD pipeline takes hours to return, which does not help either.
Apart from choosing a good, modular project...
