CMake Cookbook

Getting ready

To provide a concrete example, we imagine that we need to write a code to verify whether a number is prime. Many algorithms exist, and we can, for instance, use the sieve of Eratosthenes to separate prime numbers from non-primes. If we have to verify many numbers, we will not want to run the sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm for every single one of them. What we would like to do instead is tabulate all prime numbers once, up to a certain limit, and use a table lookup to verify a large set of numbers.

In this example, we will generate the C++ code for the lookup table (a vector of prime numbers) by using Python at compile time. Of course, to solve this particular programming problem, we could also generate the lookup table using ...