fetch-content

Using FetchContent for fun and profit

Overview

FetchContent is a relatively new addition to CMake and seems like in certain contexts it can be extremely useful.

Instead of downloading, building and installing a library as an entirely separate project, you can use FetchContent to make the dependency part of your build. In my limited experience this seems super useful for small libraries where the time to build them is pretty small or non-existent (e.g. a header-only library) but perhaps less so for a large dependency.

The problem with using FetchContent for a larger library is if you want to do a clean build for your project, you'll have to build all dependencies again too (as the library gets added to a _deps folder in your build/ folder). You might not always want this so use with care, however it does seem like a useful tool for certain situations.

Instructions

• Just run configure.bat/sh followed by build.bat/sh and then run the executable with build/<debug/release>/fetch-content-example.