I have a custom python script to build my projects in order to keep dependency simple, I would like to use Eclipse as a C++ IDE but keeping my build script.
To maintain autocompletion and intellisense (with docs etc...) I would like to tell Eclipse the (non standard) headers and defines added during dependency resolution in my script.
I've found that ".cproject" file contains such information, is it safe to alter it from the build scripts or is there any way to integrate my script in Eclipse itself?
Example:
# TestGame.json
{
"name": "TestGame",
"extend": "BASE",
"actions": ["COMPILE", "LINK"],
"CC": [
"G++11"
],
"dep": {
"builds": ["DFResourcer", "DFSDL"],
"libs": ["SDL2", "SDL2main"]
}
}
My build scripts will compile modified files and link them with all the needed files and will find "/home/cpp-projects/DFSDL/include", other paths that must be included and the need for --std=c++11, I want a way to tell Eclipse (not manually) to search for headers also there for autocompletion etc...
I've found that ".cproject" file contains such information, is it safe to alter it from the build scripts
It's doable, but not recommended, because the file format is undocumented and not guaranteed to be stable across Eclipse versions.
is there any way to integrate my script in Eclipse itself?
You could write an Eclipse plugin that runs your script and communicates with it or consumes output it produces. However, that seems like a heavyweight solution.
I would suggest the following simple solution:
Eclipse has a build output parser. I've written about how to use it in other answers, like this one. Basically, it's designed to parse the output of a make invocation, parse any line that looks like a compiler command, and configure include paths based on the -I arguments in that command.
You can make use of this even though you're using a custom build script rather than make: just get your script to output the compiler commands it invokes (if you want, you can make this conditional on a flag like --verbose), and configure Eclipse to invoke your build script rather than make (passing in the flag if you used one) when building your project.
Related
I have multiple source codes which I have to cross-build and use together as one huge project. The building process of each source code is the same './configure-make-make install' commands with added parameters for cross compilation. So far I have been managing this by typing a really long configure command "./configure CC=....." in text editor and then copy pasting that on to terminal and running it. Then repeating the process for another source code. Taking care of multiple include paths, library paths, pkg-config paths etc. the process turns out to be very messy, error-prone and cumbersome. I have already used eclipse ide and have found no option for configuring the "./configure .." command to my need. Is there any elegant way to handle this problem? I would like a solution which will require me to write minimal amount of script/instruction.
Is there any elegant way to handle this problem?
If you want to automatize the configuration and compilation of several sub-projects which are actually one project, I suggest you to use the GNU/Autotools canonical way to deal with it with is Nested Autotools project
In that way you can do a project which contains all the other projects in the following fashion:
./UmbrellaProject
subproject1/
subproject2/
...
Makefile.am
Inside the parent project Makefile.am you will have a line at the beginning such as:
SUBDIRS = subproject1 subproject2
More information at the GNU Automake docs
My C++ project includes a Bison parser. What is the scons function to call for building from ".l" and ".y" files (or alike)? By build I only mean compiling the grammar into source code.
I assume that building from lex/yacc files are natively supported, but I'm curious as to what would one need to do if one has to also build some files with an 'uncommon' compiler, say a DSL compiler for that specific project.
If you want to "teach" SCons how to process a new filetype, all you basically have to do is copying the command-line. Then you put this command into a so-called Builder, which will execute the required action at runtime and will care about the dependencies for you.
For a more detailed description of solutions to this problem, which actually depend on what exactly you want to accomplish, please have a look at our ToolsForFools guide.
At the company I'm currently working for, several IDEs are being used (they develop firmware for different embedded platforms).
All their C projects use a Makefile, so we decided to also add rules to their default Makefile to run static code analysis tools.
One of the IDEs they use is Eclipse.
Here we have added additional targets to the Make Target view, that triggers the lint target from the Makefile, for example.
Since we use multiple IDEs we can tell the tools called by the Makefile to generate specific output for the IDE being used.
For Eclipse we do this by adjusting the Build Command and adding something like IDE_ENV=eclipse to the end.
This works just fine.
Recently one of the engineers mentioned that it would be really helpful if he could run the tools, as defined in the Makefile, for a single file.
So, I updated the Makefile and it now accepts a variable SOURCE_FILE with the path of the file that needs to be checked.
In Eclipse I tried adding SOURCE_FILE=${selected_resource_loc} and just SOURCE_FILE=${resource_loc}, but these variable do not seem to work when running a Make Target.
I also tried to use $(selected_resource_loc) and $(resource_loc) directly in the Makefile, but without any luck.
Can somebody tell me how I can pass the current selected file to Make when running a target from the Make Target view?
Some Eclipse special variables can be not recognized in a build configuration. Instead of running build procedure try to use External Tools Configuration.
Similar problem was described here: Custom command for Eclipse on current file .
I am wondering how I should manage a growing C++ project. Now, I am developing a project with Netbeans and it's dirty work generating makefiles. The project has become too big and I have decided to split it up into a few parts. What is the best way of doing this?
I am trying to use Scons as my build system. I have had some success with it, but should I edit the build scripts every time I append or delete files. It's too dull.
So I need your advice.
P.S. By the way, how does a large project like google chrome do this? Does everybody use some kind of IDE to build scripts generated only for software distribution?
I also use Netbeans for C++ and compile with SCons. I use the jVi Netbeans plugin which really works well.
For some reason the Netbeans Python plugin is no longer official, which I dont understand at all. You can still get it though, and it really makes editing the SCons build scripts a nice experience. Even though Netbeans doesnt have a SCons plugin (yet?) you can still configure its build command to execute SCons.
As for maintaining the SCons scripts automatically by the IDE, I dont do that either, I do that by hand. But its not like I have to deal with this on a daily basis, so I dont see that its that important, especially considering how easy to read the scripts are.
Here's the build script in SCons that does the same as mentioned previously for CMake:
env = Environment()
env.EnsurePythonVersion(2, 5)
env.EnsureSConsVersion(2, 1)
libTarget = env.SharedLibrary(target = 'foo', source = ['a.cpp', 'b.cpp', 'c.pp'])
env.Program(target = 'bar', source = ['bar.cpp', libTarget])
The SCons Glob() function is a nice option, but I tend to shy away from automatically building all the files in a directory. The same goes for listing sub-directories to be built. Ive been burned enough times by this, and prefer explicitly specifying the file/dirs to be built.
In case you hear those rumors that SCons is slower than other alternatives, the SCons GoFastButton has some pointers that can help out.
Most large projects stick with a build system that automatically handles all the messy details for them. I'm a huge fan of CMake (which is what KDE uses for all their components) but scons is another popular choice. My editor (KDevelop) supposedly handles CMake projects itself, but I still edit the build scripts myself because it's not that hard.
I'd recommend learning one tool really well and sticking with it (plenty of documentation is available for any tool you'll be interested in). Be sure you also look into version control if you haven't already (I have a soft spot for git, but Mercurial and Subversion are also very popular choices).
A simple CMake example:
project("My Awesome Project" CXX)
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
add_library(foo SHARED a.cpp b.cpp c.cpp) #we'll build an so file
add_executable(bar bar.cpp)
target_link_libraries(bar foo) #link bar to foo
This is obviously a trivial case, but it's very easy to manage and expand as needed.
I am trying to use Scons as build system. I have some success with it, but I should edit
build scripts every time I append or delete file. It's too dull.
Depending on how your files are organized, you can use, for example, Scon's Glob() function to get source files as a list without having to list all files individually. For example, to build all c++ source files into an executable, you can do:
Program('program', Glob('*.cpp'))
You can do the same in CMake using its commands.
And, if you're using SCons, since it's Python you can write arbitrary Python code to make your source file lists.
You can also organize files into multiple folders and have subsidiary SCons (or CMakeList.txt) build files that the master build script can call.
I am trying to open an existing C++ open-source library in Xcode to publish it with my own modification/additions. The library is Tesseract-OCR, which does not include a .xcodeproj file.
Since Xcode can function as an IDE, is it possible to open a bunch of files as a single project in Xcode? Is there an easy way to produce an Xcode project?
There are several ways you could do it, depending on the level of IDE integration you want. There's no direct way of importing a Makefile-based project into Xcode. You can create a project that builds via the Makefile, but you wouldn't get many of the benefits of using an IDE, since the editor features such as word completion rely on Xcode being able to parse the files in the project. You will be able to use the debugger though. To do this, create a new project and add a custom target with a script build phase that just calls down to Makefile.
If however the project you're building compiles very easily, ie without requiring a lot of macros to be set up, include paths, etc, then it may be simple to just create an empty project and merely add all source files to it. I've used this method extensively for building boost libraries. If this is a configure && make type project then you will probably have to run the configure step first, and ensure any top level config.h files are included in the project.
If the project has a complex makefile then it is likely to be an involved task to create a useful Xcode project
I realise you asked explicitly for Xcode, but in case you were actually trying to solve the problem of "I have existing C++ code which builds and runs fine from the command line, and I'd like to code and debug it in an IDE, what should I do?" my firm recommendation would be to avoid Xcode and go for Eclipse.
The reason is that as far as I can tell, Xcode has no way of ingesting the command line build environment and effectively requires you to recreate the make process inside Xcode from scratch. Fine for tiny projects, but anything with more than a few source files and it quickly becomes painful. Whereas in Eclipse everything is built around Makefiles. So in my case I got to the "step through code with working code completion" in Eclipse a lot quicker vs. never in Xcode. This of course could be because I'm an Xcode noob, but my 2c.
To create an Xcode project from an existing cmake project, you can run cmake -G Xcode. It produces some folders and files apart from the project file, so it might be better to create a folder for it first. For example:
mkdir -p build/xcode
cd build/xcode
cmake -G Xcode ../..
Xcode is a useable IDE for library creation.
Of course a good first step is to see if the one source code will build on its own with configure scripts that are included.
If not, it becomes a question of how many libraries you need to link in.
There are resources online (or at least there used to be) for using Xcode (or perhaps it's forerunner Product builder) for porting Unix projects to Mac.
Good tutorial at: http://www.macresearch.org/tutorial-introducing-xcode-30-organizer
Another good reference is Darwin Ports.
As for doing this on your own. You can build c++ based libraries in XCode. People do that every day. You can even use one of the Xcode templates to get you started.
However, library dev requires more experience with Xcode then say a simple Cocoa "Hello World" app.
The remaining questions will be assuring that the source code's dependencies are already built into the Mac's SDK. (Don't hold your breath for linking to MFC)
It's a general question... So it's a general answer.
In Xcode8,there is "Xcode->file->add files to...",then choose your files.If you want to add several files at a time,press "Cmd" when you are choosing.