How to set compiling flags in cpp files (C++) - c++

Thank you for reading my question, I searched everywhere on the net and I couldn't find an answer.
I have a test (Olympiad in informatic) next week, The programming language that I'll be using is c++, My code gets compiled by a server which then responds whether my answer was true or false (Wrong compilation is considered as false of course), The problem is that I don't have access to the compilation phase so I can not set c++ to be compiled as c++11 (Can't set compilation flags).
My question is: Is there is any way I can add flags inside my cpp file (which will be uploaded to the server) to enable the c++11? Can it be done with predecessor with #somthing ?
Note: I have no access except to the cpp file, NO makefile, nor anything else.
Thank you For your help, i really appreciate it.

No, there isn't.
You will have to use the C++ standard dictated by the test.

There isn't a way to set the compilation flags from the code but:
From Wikipedia
On each of the two competition days, the students are typically given three problems which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works on his/her own, with only a computer and no other help allowed, specifically no communication with other contestants, books etc. Usually to solve a task the contestant has to write a computer program (in C, C++ or Pascal, and occasionally FORTRAN and PHP, C++11 is supported starting from IOI 2014, while Java is planned to be added in IOI 2015[2])
Emphasis mine

Related

Is a C or C++ program that runs without a main() against standards?

I am involved in a discussion with a colleague of mine who says it is possible to "run a program" in C and C++ without main and that too in a hosted environment. I said that's completely incorrect as per the Standards. He then asked me to see this link which mentions
In several years, an entry was submitted that was so patently absurd that it required a new definition of some of the rules for the next year. This is regarded as a high honor. An example is the world's shortest self-reproducing program. The entry was a program zero bytes in length that if run printed zero bytes to the screen (simply an empty file).
I argued that the solution would not be correct as per C and C++ Standards. What do you guys think about this?
Also check out this link.
Supposedly there have been some compilers that accepted a program without main() and supplied their own no-op fallback main() from a library. However, such programs are not conforming.
The incidence you're referring to was the smr entry of the 1994 IOCCC. However, as published by the contest, it didn't use a C compiler at all! The Makefile stanza for it contained:
smr: smr.c
#${RM} -rf smr
${CP} smr.c smr
${CHMOD} +x smr
So it didn't compile it, merely copied the empty .c into an empty shell script.
The reason why this was not discarded as completely senseless and off-topic by the judges must have been that the empty file is (at least traditionally) a legal compilation unit in C and compiles to an .o without problems if you want to -- it just isn't enough to form a complete program.
main is certainly the standard entry point for C programs, but it's possible for non-standard C programs to start somewhere else, for instance Windows GUI apps tend to start at WinMain instead, or the linker has an /ENTRY directive so you can completely bypass the CRT and start your application with a custom function.
If a program in a hosted environment doesn't have a main then it's not C or C++, as per the standards.

Creating a limited use version of a program in VC++

Our company helps migrate client software from other languages to C++. We provide them C++ source code for their application along with header files and compiled libraries for runtime support functions. We charge for both the migration as well as the runtime. Recently a potential client asked to migrate one of a number of systems they have. This system contains 7 programs and we would like to limit the runtime so only these 7 programs can acess it. We can time limit the runtime by putting an encrypted expiration date in the object library but, since we have to provide the source code for the converted programs, we are having difficult coming up with a way to limit the access to a specific set of programs. Obviously, anything we put into the source code to identify the program could be copied to any other program so the only hope seems to be having the run time library discover some set of characteristics about the programs and then validating them against a set of characteristics embedded in the run time library. As I understand it, C++ has very little reflection capability (RTTI is all I could find) so I wanted to ask if anyone has faced a similar problem and found a way to solve it. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Based on the two answers a little clarification seems in order. We fully expect the client to modify the source code and normally we provide them an unrestricted version of the runtime libraries. This particular client requested a version that was limited to a single system and is happy to enter into a license that restricts the use of the runtime library to that system. Therefore a discussion of the legal issues isn't relevant. The issue is a technical one -- given a license that is limited to a single system and given that the client has the source to the calling programs but not the runtime, is there a way to limit access to the runtime to the set of programs comprising that system thus enforcing the terms of the license.
If they're not supposed to make further changes to the programs, why did you give them the source code? And if they are expected to continue changing the programs (i.e. maintenance), who decides whether a change constitutes a new program that's not allowed to use the library?
There's no technical way to enforce that licensing model.
There's possibly a legal way -- in the code that loads/enables the library, write a comment "This is a copy protection measure". Then DMCA forbids them from including that code into other programs (in the USA). But IANAL, and I don't think DMCA is valid anyway.
Consult a lawyer to find out what rights you have under the contract/bill of sale to restrict their use.
The most obvious answer I could think of is to get the name and/or path of the calling process-- simply compare this name to the 7 "allowed" programs in your support library. Certainly, they could create a new process with the same name, but they might not know to do so.
Another level could be to further compare the executable size against the known size for that application. (You'll likely want to allow a reasonably wide range around the expected size, in case they make changes to the source code, and/or compile with different options.)
As another thought, you might try adding some seemingly benign strings into the app's resources. ("Copyright 2011 ~Your Corporation Name~")-- You can then scan the parent executable for the magic strings. If they create a new product, they might not think to create this resource.
Finally, as already noted by Ben, if you are giving them the source code, there are likely no foolproof solutions to this problem. (As he said, at what point does "modified" code become a new application?) The best you will likely be able to do is to add enough small roadblocks that they won't bother trying to use that lib for another product. It likely depends on how determined and/or lucky they are.
Why not just technically limit the use of the runtime to one system? There are many software protection solutions out there, one that comes to my mind is SmartDongle.
Now the runtime could still be used by any other program on that machine, but I think this should be a minor concern, no?

Edit and Continue on GDB

I know that E&C is a controversial subject and some say that it encourages a wrong approach to debugging, but still - I think we can agree that there are numerous cases when it is clearly useful - experimenting with different values of some constants, redesigning GUI parameters on-the-fly to find a good look... You name it.
My question is: Are we ever going to have E&C on GDB? I understand that it is a platform-specific feature and needs some serious cooperation with the compiler, the debugger and the OS (MSVC has this one easy as the compiler and debugger always come in one package), but... It still should be doable. I've even heard something about Apple having it implemented in their version of GCC [citation needed]. And I'd say it is indeed feasible.
Knowing all the hype about MSVC's E&C (my experience says it's the first thing MSVC users mention when asked "why not switch to Eclipse and gcc/gdb"), I'm seriously surprised that after quite some years GCC/GDB still doesn't have such feature. Are there any good reasons for that? Is someone working on it as we speak?
It is a surprisingly non-trivial amount of work, encompassing many design decisions and feature tradeoffs. Consider: you are debugging. The debugee is suspended. Its image in memory contains the object code of the source, and the binary layout of objects, the heap, the stacks. The debugger is inspecting its memory image. It has loaded debug information about the symbols, types, address mappings, pc (ip) to source correspondences. It displays the call stack, data values.
Now you want to allow a particular set of possible edits to the code and/or data, without stopping the debuggee and restarting. The simplest might be to change one line of code to another. Perhaps you recompile that file or just that function or just that line. Now you have to patch the debuggee image to execute that new line of code the next time you step over it or otherwise run through it. How does that work under the hood? What happens if the code is larger than the line of code it replaced? How does it interact with compiler optimizations? Perhaps you can only do this on a specially compiled for EnC debugging target. Perhaps you will constrain possible sites it is legal to EnC. Consider: what happens if you edit a line of code in a function suspended down in the call stack. When the code returns there does it run the original version of the function or the version with your line changed? If the original version, where does that source come from?
Can you add or remove locals? What does that do to the call stack of suspended frames? Of the current function?
Can you change function signatures? Add fields to / remove fields from objects? What about existing instances? What about pending destructors or finalizers? Etc.
There are many, many functionality details to attend to to make any kind of usuable EnC work. Then there are many cross-tools integration issues necessary to provide the infrastructure to power EnC. In particular, it helps to have some kind of repository of debug information that can make available the before- and after-edit debug information and object code to the debugger. For C++, the incrementally updatable debug information in PDBs helps. Incremental linking may help too.
Looking from the MS ecosystem over into the GCC ecosystem, it is easy to imagine the complexity and integration issues across GDB/GCC/binutils, the myriad of targets, some needed EnC specific target abstractions, and the "nice to have but inessential" nature of EnC, are why it has not appeared yet in GDB/GCC.
Happy hacking!
(p.s. It is instructive and inspiring to look at what the Smalltalk-80 interactive programming environment could do. In St80 there was no concept of "restart" -- the image and its object memory were always live, if you edited any aspect of a class you still had to keep running. In such environments object versioning was not a hypothetical.)
I'm not familiar with MSVC's E&C, but GDB has some of the things you've mentioned:
http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Altering.html#Altering
17. Altering Execution
Once you think you have found an error in your program, you might want to find out for certain whether correcting the apparent error would lead to correct results in the rest of the run. You can find the answer by experiment, using the gdb features for altering execution of the program.
For example, you can store new values into variables or memory locations, give your program a signal, restart it at a different address, or even return prematurely from a function.
Assignment: Assignment to variables
Jumping: Continuing at a different address
Signaling: Giving your program a signal
Returning: Returning from a function
Calling: Calling your program's functions
Patching: Patching your program
Compiling and Injecting Code: Compiling and injecting code in GDB
This is a pretty good reference to the old Apple implementation of "fix and continue". It also references other working implementations.
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gdb/2003-06/msg00500.html
Here is a snippet:
Fix and continue is a feature implemented by many other debuggers,
which we added to our gdb for this release. Sun Workshop, SGI ProDev
WorkShop, Microsoft's Visual Studio, HP's wdb, and Sun's Hotspot Java
VM all provide this feature in one way or another. I based our
implementation on the HP wdb Fix and Continue feature, which they
added a few years back. Although my final implementation follows the
general outlines of the approach they took, there is almost no shared
code between them. Some of this is because of the architectual
differences (both the processor and the ABI), but even more of it is
due to implementation design differences.
Note that this capability may have been removed in a later version of their toolchain.
UPDATE: Dec-21-2012
There is a GDB Roadmap PDF presentation that includes a slide describing "Fix and Continue" among other bullet points. The presentation is dated July-9-2012 so maybe there is hope to have this added at some point. The presentation was part of the GNU Tools Cauldron 2012.
Also, I get it that adding E&C to GDB or anywhere in Linux land is a tough chore with all the different components.
But I don't see E&C as controversial. I remember using it in VB5 and VB6 and it was probably there before that. Also it's been in Office VBA since way back. And it's been in Visual Studio since VS2005. VS2003 was the only one that didn't have it and I remember devs howling about it. They intended to add it back anyway and they did with VS2005 and it's been there since. It works with C#, VB, and also C and C++. It's been in MS core tools for 20+ years, almost continuous (counting VB when it was standalone), and subtracting VS2003. But you could still say they had it in Office VBA during the VS2003 period ;)
And Jetbrains recently added it too their C# tool Rider. They bragged about it (rightly so imo) in their Rider blog.

Is there such a thing as a C++ interpreter? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Have you used any of the C++ interpreters (not compilers)?
Hi,
I am currently learning C++ and a beginner in programming in general. I've been trying to write some code to a few programming problems from the book I'm using. What I find is that often I make mistakes in what I write and those mistakes come up when the program is run. Its usually quite obvious where in the program I've gone wrong when there is regular output. But in a long computation I'm often not sure why a particular code has acted a certain way. I've also looked at Python recently. Python works with an interpreter, which can take any piece of Python code and compute its output.
I was wondering if there was something similar for C++. Right now when I want to check a line or block of code I have to comment out a lot, save it, compile it, and then run it from a command line. And I have to do that many times for a single error until I've solved it. Is there a way to type code into an active terminal which would run code and show me output? What would be better still would be a way to select a block of code (like you select text) or multiple blocks (to see how a function is being handled) within the IDE and click run to run just that block of code and see its output without having comment out irrelevant lines or to save the file. The compiled code could just reside in memory.
CINT is a c & C++ interpretter that accepts nearly all valid C++. Unfortunately many Linux distros do not offer it, and you'll probably have to build it from source... and that is a non-trivial task.
Typically a debugger is used to step through code line by line, starting at a chosen breakpoint, and keep watch of all variables/values.
Unit testing is a technique to test smaller pieces of code.
A stepping debugger, as found in most IDEs will help you with this.
Here (for example) is a description of how to set the Execution point in In Visual Studio, which sounds like what you want to do.
For certain situations, the "Immediate Window" may be of use to you. It allows you to type in expressions to evaluate immediately.
Rather than just running individual lines independently, or relying on print statements to tell you the state of whatever variables you have decided to print, you can use the debugger to run to the point of interest (where you will have set a breakpoint), then you can examine the state of any in-scope variables, or even alter the normal flow of the program.
There are some solutions that try to do this - the ones I know are Ch and TextTransformer.
However, I doubt that this works very well. C++ is not at all designed to run as an interpreted language.
One of the problems is that C++ is very, very hard to parse. And this makes it very hard to provide certain types of tools that are usual for other languages. For example, I don't think there is any C++ refactoring tool that really works well.
C++ is a compiled language not like python. But there are few c/c++ interpreters out there but not sure about their features. Check these out: Ch interpreter and CINT
If you really want to learn c++ please do not use the c/c++ interpreters.
If you insist on using a interactive interpreter there is since a long time CINT which is the default interpreter used in the ROOT project. It got better over the years, but still has only limited capabilities when dealing with templates. Also, there is a move to replace it with a JIT compiling interpreter based on clang inside the ROOT project.
If I were you I would learn how to run compiler and an interactive debugger like suggested in some comments already.

How can completely port a qt3 library to qt4?

I have been stumbling through some different steps to do this. I ran the qt3to4.exe on the files with compile errors and got though a lot of conversion steps, however now I am getting this error:
1>c:\qt\4.7.0\src\qt3support\widgets\q3toolbar.h(64) : error C2039: 'ToolBarDock' : is not a
member of 'Qt'
and 55 other similar errors. This confuses me since it is in qt's own q3support library. I also saw on a QT help page (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt-qt3.html) that ToolBarDock is deprecated and Qt::Dock should be used instead.
I haven't found much help on this out there. I'm using the library inside Visual Studio 2008. Any QT/visual studio experts out there?
If this helps, here is the code it is failing on in q3toolbar.h:
Q3ToolBar(const QString &label,
Q3MainWindow *, Qt::ToolBarDock = Qt::DockTop,
bool newLine = false, const char* name=0);
Actually qt34qt4 doesn't do all things right. There are many methods, enums etc, which are not converted. It is more or less simple find-replace tool which replace following instructions from qt\tools\porting\q3porting.xml
In many cases there is a replacement definition for a class, but not for a method of this class. In some cases qt3to4 replaces enums and methods in code which doesn't belong to Qt-classes at all. So be carefull. In any case, I would suggest getting a list of all Qt classes in you code, read carefully porting notes (http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.5/porting4.html) for each class you use.
Another issue are return types, qt3to4 doesn't check how the returned value is used. Fortunate qt3to4 makes a good job, so fixing the rest is often a trivial, repetitive task.
If you have to port UIs, take a look at undocumented argument -wrap of uic3.
P.S.: Some figures for your effort estimation, may be usefull: I've ported (got compiled) once 600TLOCs + 150 UIs in 2,5 Months, currently I am porting about 150 TLOCs project and got pretty far in 2 weeks.
I had these errors as well after importing a project into VC++. Adding QT3_SUPPORT to the preprocessor definitions fixed it.
I ended up going a different route on this problem. I found the implementations I needed from the "qt3 library" somewhere else. Just before I found that out, I got some advice from some coworkers here. The consensus was that I'd need to rebuild Qt specifying to include qt3 support. Although I didn't follow through with this, here are some helpful links.
http://www.qtcentre.org/wiki/index.php?title=Qt4_with_Visual_Studio
http://lists.trolltech.com/qt-interest/2006-11/thread00177-0.html
If anyone comes across this and gets through this problem, please post your solution! Thanks.