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Use libraries

Brief​

In the real world no one writes everything from scratch. If you need a feature, most likely other people have had the same need before you, and chances are they made a library out of it! If you need a big thing and are almost ready to spend the next three months implementing it, it might be wise to first have a look on the internet and see if some solution already exists. Most often you will discover that there is even several of them and you will have the leisure to pick and chose the one that seems to best suit your needs.

How to​

Build from source​

Building from source means that:

  • anyone simply has to clone your project and is guaranteed to have all the dependencies
  • you never have any version conflict
  • you can tweak the libraries if you need to (and if their license allows so)
  • you have quick access to the source code to read it and your IDE can jump to it

To add a library to your project you can simply download the folder and copy it into your project, but a better practice is to use a Git submodule.

Add them to your project with CMake​

If the library provides good CMake support, all you should have to do is:

add_subdirectory(libname)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE libname)

If not, then you will have to define the target and its requirements yourself. For that, check out the lesson on CMake for library authors.

Read the documentation​

Read the doc! Really! Or at least all the tutorial and introduction parts!
Whenever I finally take the time to sit down and go through the documentation of a library I use, I always end up cursing myself for not doing it earlier because I learn so much while reading it and I realize it would have saved me a lot of debugging time if I had read it before trying to blindly use the library! Plus you will discover amazing features that you were not even aware of!

tip

Take the time and Read the Fucking Manual. Programing is a slow and patient process. You will save time later down the road if you take the time to do things properly from the get go.