A group of students and I are making a C++ game, but they have Windows and I have a Mac is there something we can use to share code between the systems?
I know Eclipse will work but I get Unresolved conclusion: <iostream> as an error. If anyone can help with that it would be great.
If you want something to actually "share the code" with, I would recommend git using github as the remote location. Its free and easy to use.
If your question is about the code not working, make sure you have X11 configured properly, and have the Eclipse C++ plugin installed.
And I would also recommend using XCode as your editor instead of Eclipse. It has a much better environment for C++, IMHO.
Hope this helps.
Personally I'd recommend setting up a cross-platform build process using something like CMake (http://www.cmake.org). CMake in particular will generate platform-specific project files for you -- so your friends could be working in Visual Studio and you could be working in Eclipse or XCode, with no problems at all (of course, you'd have to write portable code... :))
As far as sharing code and version control goes, I agree with Jon that something like git is ideal.
We build our Windows+Mac+Linux apps using Qt, which includes a nice build system (qmake) and cross-platform APIs (so the same code will run on all OS's) and an IDE (which I haven't used but I hear is okay).
With multiple developers you'll definitely want some sort of source-code-management system as well, git and svn are both good choices there.
I haven't done much coding in C++, but I? noticed that I have to run these build scripts for everything. HOw do people do these on windows machines? I am thinking about running a virtual machine anyway, so I don't have to fill my machine with python and other such installations.
How does everyone else on windows do it?
There's always cygwin if you want to run the standard UNIX type tools, such as make, etc.
MinGw comes with a gcc-compatible Compiler and Make System. So if you want to use makefiles, this is a possible way. If you need an IDE, Eclipse CDT might be for you.
However, I prefer Visual Studio, mainly for personal reasons (experience gathered over years) and debugging seemed to work somewhat better.
You might also want to look at CMake for a platform independet build tool.
AFAIK you can simply get the python executable and put them somewhere where the scripts can access them, inside your project code. That way you don't have to install it in the system and you don't have to use a virtual machine either.
I wanted to create a cross-platform 2D game engine, and I would like to
know how to create a cross-platform project with Makefile, so I can compile it to the platforms I choose with custom rule for any platform.
I'm working on the windows enviroment with Visual C++ Express 2008, so it would be nice
if I can use Visual C++ Express as the IDE.
My platforms are YET the Nintendo DS and the PC.
Please instruct me what to do.
Thanks in advance, Tamir.
Don't use make, use a cross-platform tool like cmake, it will take care of the platform-specific generation for you. Like on Windows, it will generate the project files to use Visual Studio; on Linux, it will generate the GNU make files for you. You can set it up to find the right versions of the right libraries and everything. Cmake is great.
CMake is not a compiler (neither is make) - it is a cross-platform build automation system. It allows you to develop on any platform and it defaults to assuming you're developing for the platform you're running. You can specify parameters if you want to do other things. However, most of the "cross-platform" stuff is still left to your code. I would also recommend a library that has been tested on many platforms, like Boost. Using Boost can help keep all your code working smoothly on any system and there is basically no overhead to using it.
I know you can use Makefiles to do #defines, which is, in turn, a common trick for swapping out chunks of code. There are also ways to detect the platform, although that's mostly for Mac/Windows/Linux differences.
Also, Travis is probably right; having your makefiles themselves be cross-platform is really excellent, since it's easier to then setup build servers and things.
To quote the FAQ, 'No question is [...] too "newbie"'
What is the best way to set up an Windows system (vista, if that matters) to work with C++?
Preferably with a nice IDE, easy compiling of software (support for make files, etc.), but suitable for a beginner.
I would quite like the IDE to use a relatively portable format, such as makefiles and configure scripts, nothing too proprietary.
I would also like the ability to add new libraries etc. without much hassle, and work with the majority of C++ code others have written.
I am comfortable using the command line.
Thanks for the help, hopefully the question is clear. And apologies if it's already been answered, i did have a look for similar questions.
I know this is not exactly 'nothing to proprietary' but you should give a look at the free Express Edition of Visual C++. Under its covers you'll get all the familiar make and command line tools, but wrapped in a polished IDE.
If you're really comfortable with the command line then you can make an IDE from code editor on top of a compiler/debugger suite. MS's own command line tools come with the platform SDK (free) and you get an awesome debugger in Windbg. My personal favorite code editor is Code Insight. I wish so hard for a Mac version /sigh.
Microsoft's Visual Studio has a free express edition which contains pretty much everything you need to program c++.
For a Gui, the main choices are probably, MFC (old and ugly), CLR/.Net (new and confusing) or look at Qt(now LGPL) or wxWigets
There are quite a few good IDEs for C++ available on Windows.
The de-facto standard for professional software development is Microsoft's Visual Studio, which is available in different versions, like the free Express Editions. This will give you a great tool-chain for Windows development.
However, for a more "cross-platform" approach, you should have a look to the free Eclipse C++ Development Tooling, which is available for many platforms. As long as your own code is platform-independent, the whole project can be shared between Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
Other alternatives are MinGW or CygWin that both allow to use the GCC toolchain on Windows.
Try the MinGW compiler, it will come with a C and C++ compiler, Make, etc--among many others. This can be used from the command line, pretty easily: g++ -o someprogram.exe somecode.cpp
As for an IDE, there are lots out there. Right now I am using Code::Blocks, and so far it's been really nice. As well, it already supports the GCC compiler, and sets many of the appropriate flags for you, so all you'll really need to do is hit the "build" button.
Some others you might want to try are Eclipse, which is really powerful, but lots of its "power" will be really confusing and difficult to use until you start getting used to it. Visual C++ is another one, which (obviously) would integrate very nicely into Windows. Of course, you could always use emacs :)
I suggest you evaluate CodeBlocks.
Microsoft's Visual Studio is powerful but rather proprietary. If you prefer open/portable stuff, I recommend Dev-C++ and Cygwin.
FWIW, I recently went through this and tried the VC++ Express and QT Creator based stuff. Coming from a linux/unix background I found that QT was a little better since it was using the Ming compilers and some make based constructs.
If you will only be hacking for windows I would go for Visual Studio. It will definitely save you time you can spend on coding instead. Most open source out there for windows either already have VC project, and if they don't it is usually very simple to set one up. And normally they have either make or nmake files for you to build VC compatible libararies to link with.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I develop C++ applications in a Linux environment. The tools I use every day include Eclipse with the CDT plugin, gdb and valgrind.
What tools do other people use? Is there anything out there for Linux that rivals the slickness of Microsoft Visual Studio?
I use a bunch of terminal windows. I have vim running on interesting source files, make and g++ output on another for compiler errors or a gdb session for runtime errors. If I need help finding definitions I run cscope and use vim's cscope support to jump around.
Eclipse CDT is my second choice. It's nice but huge, ungainly and slow compared to vim.
Using terminal windows and vim is very flexible because I do not need to carry 400 MB of Java around with me I can use SSH sessions from anywhere.
I use valgrind when I need to find a memory issue.
I use strace to watch what my software is doing on a system call level. This lets me clean up really stupid code that calls time(0) four times in a row or makes too many calls to poll() or non-blocking read() or things like calling read() on a socket to read 1 byte at a time. (That is super inefficient and lazy!)
I use objdump -d to inspect the machine code, especially for performance sensitive inner loops. That is how I find things like the slowness of the array index operator on strings compared to using iterators.
I use oprofile to try to find hot spots in optimized code, I find that it often works a little better than gprof, and it can do things like look for data and instruction cache misses. That can show you where to drop some helpful prefetch hints using GCC's __builtin_prefetch. I tried to use it to find hot mis-predicted branches as well, but couldn't get that to work for me.
Update: I've found that perf works way better than oprofile. At least on Linux. Learn to use perf and love it as I do.
g++ of course, but also Code::Blocks which is an absolutely fantastic cross platform IDE (Win32, *nix, Mac).
I use the nightly (more like weekly lately) builds from the SVN. It has almost all the bells and whistles you would expect from a modern IDE. It's really a truly fantastic Open Source project.
Also, on Linux you get the joy of using Valgrind which is probably the best memory tracker (it does other things as well) tool that money can buy. And it's free :) Track down memory leaks and more with ease.
And there is just so much more! Linux is such a great dev platform :)
(edit) Just realized you mentioned Valgrind in your question, silly me for reading it too fast.
When develop C++ apps for linux, i prefer using a bunch of cmdline tools.
Vim extended with a lot of plugins.
Gdb with ddd, valgrind, libefence
and SCons (automake is a pain in ... you know where)
g++
emacs
bash command line
gdb-mode in emacs (type M-X gdb)
make
emacs, cmake, gdb, git, valgrind. It may not be as slick as Visual Studio but it works well, and it's easy to add functionality via bash scripting or emacs lisp.
Right now I use Qt Creator. It's cross-platform and integrates pretty nicely with Qt, though (of course) you have the option of creating a standalone application.
g++ and make
I believe KDevelop is what would be the closest from Microsoft Visual Studio.
You get pretty much everything (except unfortunately VS debugger which is indeed a killer).
Its already mature and its development is pretty fast and promising.
It actually implement a few stuff you won't even see in VS. For instance, open header file and cpp file in vertical tile mode, and have the cursor synchronized in both,
ie: when you select a functions prototype, you always have its implementation on your right.
KDevelop is a KDE project, but run on Gnome. Anjuta is an equivalent project on Gnome, but I find it unusable for real work. For the rest of the stack gcc make valgrind ddd (a gdb IDE) and python for scripting my code.
If you're ok to try a different approach than the VS IDE. You may consider trying vim. It takes a long time to get used to it though.
Eclipse CDT is really quite nice. I still have to resort to Emacs from time to time but I really love the indexing, call trees, type trees, refactoring support (thought it's nothing like Java refactoring), etc. Syntax highlighting is quite powerful if you customize it (can have separate colors for local variables, function arguments, methods, etc.). The code completion is really handy too. I've mostly used Eclipse 3.3 but 3.4 is great too.
Also, mostly I'm using this for a somewhat large project (~1e6 sloc) -- it may be overkill for toy projects.
When I developed C++ code on linux, I used emacs as an editor and as a gdb front-end. Later, my company purchased SlickEdit for all of the programmers, which is a nice IDE, maybe not on a par with Visual Studio. We used gdb extensively, with the occasional use of valgrind and gprof. I highly recommend using a scripting language to complement C++ on day-to-day tasks. I went from PERL to python to the current ruby. All of them get the job done and have strengths where C++ has weaknesses. And, of course, you have all the shell commands at your disposal. I daily use sort(), uniq(), awk, etc. And one more recommendation is ack, a grep successor.
You need a standard toolchain + an IDE.
There's nothing much to say about the standard toolchain. Just install e.g. on Ubuntu/Debian via
aptitude install build-essential
The interesting part is about an IDE.
My personal impression is that nowadays - in the 21th century - vi/emacs/make/autotools/configure is not enough for developing software projects above a certain size (... and yes, please please please blame me for the heritage heresy ...).
Which IDE to choose is simply a matter of taste. You will find a lot of threads on SOF. Here is a permalink discussing which C++ IDE might be the "best": C++ IDE for Linux.
I use the NetBeans C++ plugin, which is superb and integrates with CVS and SVN. The project management side is also very good. I was up and running with it in minutes. It's an impressive IDE but being Java, can be a little sluggish.
GCC
GHC
Vim
Cmake
cscope
GDB
Valgrind
strace
git
Is there really anything else you could possibly need?
Bash
Vim
Make
G++
GDB
Valgrind
Gprof
svn
Never a GUI to be seen except a good terminal with tab support; keep code, debugger, output, etc all in separate windows and tab back and forwards really quickly.
In addition to many already listed, we use the autoconf toolset for deploying our program to users.
CMake
vim
g++
kdevelop (compiled from SVN daily!)
Mercurial when I can, SVN when I have to, git when there's really no other choice (contributing to project that uses it)
valgrind
Anjuta is a nice idea that makes Linux C++ dev quite enjoyable as well.
I'm another for KDevelop. It has a very diverse set of tools. I'm not real familiar with VS and whether or not it has integrated console access via its interface, but KDevelop can allow you to run a konsole inside the IDE, which I always find very useful. You could always give Netbeans a go now that it has full C/C++ support.
Other than that, I make good use of gdb and its gui-based version ddd for problems with the code or other bugs. For throw-away programs, like others that already posted - I use g++ at the terminal and make for some larger projects.
Eclipse CDT for editing, SVN for source control, SCons for build management, CruiseControl for automated builds and a proprietary unit test framework.
I use Eclipse+CDT on Windows and Cygwin + g++ to cross compile for Linux.
(Cross compilers are built using crosstool, a nice script-set for generating cross compilers)
Mi first choice is allways emacs with a lot of plugins: ecb gives some buffers to navigate on the folders, gdb, svn or git integration... This is mi first choice using Python too.
As a second choice, Netbeans with C++ plugin, is very simple and quite powerfull, but too heavy I think.
I use whatever is on the system. I prefer Eclipse CDT as an editor, and g++ as a compiler. However, if eclipse is not an option I use vi, which is fine as well.
The Eclipse incubation project Linux Tools integrates C/C++ Development tools.
It's a GUI plugin to integrate tools like Valgrind, GProf, GCov, SystemTap etc into the Eclipse C++ CDT IDE.
Search for Eclipse Helios IDE for C/C++ Linux Developers (includes Incubating components), (120 MB)
Found this after trying to build Linux Tools using the .psf file available.
Thankfully found this package hiding right at the bottom of the Helios packages download page.
Note that this is an incubation project so you can expect the support to only get better with time.
See Also:
For updated info on installing and using Eclipse Linux Tools Click Here
FlexeLint for static code analysis, in addition to mentioned above:
Eclipse with CDT, gcc, make, gdb, valgrind, bash shell.
Source version control: Clearcase or git, depending on project.