What I Wish I Had Known About Developing C/C++ From Linux Before I Started

http://derwiki.tumblr.com/post/98651197/what-i-wish-i-had-known-about-developing-c-c-from

by derwiki • 17 years ago

89 101 17 years ago

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keefe11• 17 years ago

This is a nice list! However, I really think that increasing speed of development with better tools is a cornerstone of being one of those elite programmers, and vim<<eclipse, at least for Java! I haven't done C/C++ for some time... but I expected similar IDEs exist. "The way our development environment is set up though, there was really no good way to use Eclipse because everything is done on a remote development box, and they won’t let us run Eclipse and forward over X (which is reasonable; Eclipse has a lot of overhead)" I think this is just a horrendous setup and unless there is some compelling reason (e.g. scientific computing on a cluster? even then...) that there should be a much cleaner separation between development boxes and production boxes and most of your code should be developed on a local box with some canned data for testing and then pushed out to production when that is done. This may require some effort, but the decrease in turnaround time for changes will be worth it in almost every scenario.

allenbrunson• 17 years ago

my thoughts exactly. in my last job, i spent over two years writing linux server apps. but i developed all my code on a mac. the low-level posix apis are nearly identical between the two, so other than a few ifdefs, i could barely tell the difference.

derwiki5• 17 years ago

It's a rather massive codebase, and our remote dev machines are a lot beefier than our laptops -- also 64-bit, whereas our laptops are 32-bit. I'm not saying it couldn't be done locally, but it might actually cause more headaches than it solves.

dkarl3• 17 years ago

IDEs can work well editing code that is targeted to a different platform. The code is edited locally (and parsed, analyzed, colorized, etc. by the IDE locally) but built and run remotely on other machines. That setup used to be pretty common for enterprise and web development before Moore let us run entire enterprise application servers on our laptops. It takes more work to set up than just sshing into a remote box and firing up emacs, but it can be done.

keefe11• 17 years ago

It might and your approach may be optimal already. I guess it's a question of how much the environments differ? When I am moving to a new project I try to get myself setup so I can make changes and test them as quickly as possible and it's always a judgment call about how much time to spend doing that setup. Also, there is a cultural element like one poster said if everyone is using vim them that becomes a clear choice...

scott_s4• 17 years ago

Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment. That is, all of the development tools are integrated into the editor.

I don't develop using an IDE, but I still have access to the same kind of functionality. It's just not integrated into my editor.

keefe11• 17 years ago

and so imho this increases your turnaround time for changes unless you are a real wizard with your tools, which is certainly possible

dkarl3• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, your expectations would not be met. IDEs make up for their limited text-editing features by providing language-dependent, code-aware functionality. Because C++ is such a hairy language, IDEs aren't able to do much with it. They don't give you anything like the cushy, comprehensive support that IDEs provide for Java. With C++, giving up the relatively lame IDE features to get a powerful text editor is a no-brainer. (I use Eclipse for Java and emacs for everything else.)

You're absolutely right about their development environment; it's adapted for one set of tools. It doesn't necessarily mean other tools are inferior in general, as the author seems to conclude.

derwiki5• 17 years ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that one set of tools is inferior. If I was doing Java development, I would fight harder to make Eclipse work for the project. But the specifics of our infrastructure, SCM, and utilities (we do have ctags and cscope) set up -- and the fact that the team has been using vim/emacs to do this job for the last 15 years -- makes vim/emacs a more natural choice.

keefe11• 17 years ago

I find this post highly questionable. What is so hairy about C++ for an IDE exactly? It's strongly typed and yes, if you do too much C style stuff it may be a bit harder to navigate but if you stay in a clean OO world it should be very, very similar to Java. Microsoft put out a competent C++ IDE well over a decade ago and Borland has done so as well... It's my personal opinion that IDEs are in general superior to text editors because this integration reduces the cognitive load of solving particular programming problems. People that say eclipse doesn't have a good text editor are being a bit ridiculous - out of the box it is not that great, but there are many 3rd party editor plugins, you could configure shortcut keys however you want and of course extend eclipse... now I am somewhat biased in that I work daily on an eclipse RCP project, so I am already spun up on extending eclipse. This all has me curious though, I'll spin up eclipse C++ development against my thesis code the next (likely imaginary) opportunity I have time to kill...

bitwize• 17 years ago

Clearly spoken by someone who's never seen Visual Studio.

donaq• 17 years ago

I haven't done much development in Java since my days in college, but...

However, I really think that increasing speed of development with better tools is a cornerstone of being one of those elite programmers, and vim<<eclipse, at least for Java!

For every other language that I have encountered, the utilities listed by the OP (especially vim/emacs) are the better tools, as far as I'm concerned. Firstly, they were written by hackers for hackers, and because of that, they generalize just about all the functionality a programmer is likely to need when coding in any language. Even supposing there were eclipse-like IDEs for every language out there, it is more than likely that there will necessarily be differences between them (since they were written for different languages) which will be jarring for the power user. One would have to learn an IDE for every language. With vim and the assorted tools mentioned in the OP, one just needs to learn one set of tools and can use them for every language. If you foresee that you will only code in one language for the rest of your life, then sure, find the best IDE for that language. In my job, however, I have to code in C++, Python, Perl, PHP and shell (most times editing source files in more than one language at the same time), so to increase speed of development, (though I am no elite programmer) I use vim.

keefe11• 17 years ago

Do vim and emacs really have all the features of eclipse? Autocomplete, integration with Javadocs, automated refactoring, integration with bug tracking systems, integration with source control, full debugging inside of the server all with the click of a button? Do you have a resource for how to setup emacs this way? I used to use emacs...

mblakele2• 17 years ago

I use "screen" a lot, but I wish it had a better name. It helps if you search for "gnu-screen", but not much.

Here's a tip that has saved me once or twice. If you start a long-running process, but forgot to use screen or nohup, bash lets you 'disown -h' its jobspec.

silentbicycle10• 17 years ago

One day I took the time to work this out for my .screenrc, and it's served me well since:

  # Set up my status line at the bottom of every frame
  caption always "%{gb}  %{ck}%m-%d %C %{gb}  %{gb}%?%-Lw%?%{ck}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{gb}%?%+Lw%?"

All of the %{gb} things are color codes. It looks like this: http://shenani.gen.nz/~scott/screen-statusbar.png

Binding ! @ # etc. to select 10, 11, 12, ... is handy, too.

mblakele2• 17 years ago

That's good. Here's what I'm using:

  hardstatus alwayslastline
  hardstatus string "%n: %H (%h) %t"

For bindings, I find '10 '11 etc to be efficient enough. But I also make heavy use of :number to reorder my windows so that I know which one is which. There's also shift-A, to give them meaningful labels in the ctrl-A " list.

joeyo• 17 years ago

There are more .screenrcs (including my own) in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425890

thingie3• 17 years ago

The biggest problem with screen is that it breaks ordinary virtual terminal scrollback, which is something that I can live with, but…

derwiki5• 17 years ago

"Ctrl-a [" will put you enter the copy buffer mode and let you scroll up

greyboy• 17 years ago

Does this not work for you?

From http://www4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~jnweiger/screen-faq....

  Q: My xterm scrollbar does not work with screen.
  A: The problem is that xterm will not allow scrolling if the
     alternate text buffer is selected. The standard
     definitions of the termcap initialize capabilities ti and
     te switch to and from the alternate text buffer. (The 
     scrollbar also does not work when you start e.g. 'vi'). 
     You can tell screen not to use these initialisations by 
     adding the line termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@ to your 
     ~/.screenrc file.

ovi256• 17 years ago

I might be slow about screen, but how is it different from running several tabs in Terminal on Mac OS X for example ?

I can see it being useful in ssh through : you can have it emulate tabs through a single ssh connection.

bcl2• 17 years ago

screen is persistent over dropped connections. Lets say you are doing some long running operations on a remote server and your connection drops. With screen you can log back in and run 'screen -r' to resume the session.

hboon• 17 years ago

There's an incremental find option in Eclipse. Ctrl-j or was it Ctrl-i (or something like that) which is pretty nice and I wish all IDEs (read: IDEs) have that. That beats Ctrl-F any day.

How did you do refactorings? Or you just don't?

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Which IDEs don't? Borland/Codegear IDEs have had that at Ctrl+E for over a decade, while Visual Studio defaults to Ctrl+I. F3/Shift+F3 scroll backward and forward through matches by default.

jballanc• 17 years ago

In Vim, install ack, then put "set grepprg=ack" in your .vimrc. Then, open your project in Vim, do a ":grep <your-symbol-here>", and use ":cn", ":cnf", ":cp", ":cpf", ":cr", etc. to move about. Combined with strong knowledge of setting marks and using ":s/" substitutions, and I often wonder how people who use IDEs do refactorings! ;-)

miloshh• 17 years ago

I think you misunderstood what refactoring means in an IDE. Suppose you want to rename a method. There might be many other methods of the same name in different classes, local variables of that name in other methods, or even classes with that same name in differen packages. Eclipse automatically does all of this for you.

I honestly don't understand how regexps and strong bookmarking skills could help you - the editor needs true knowledge of the language to carry out this task.

zandorg• 17 years ago

I just use Kdevelop.

Periodic• 17 years ago

When I started developing in C in Vim there are two things I've gotten used to that I can't live without now: ctags and auto-complete (they help with eachother).

Ctags is great, especially for navigating someone else's code. What does this function do? Just ctrl-] and suddenly I'm at its definition. Something in there I don't recognize, same thing. Ctrl-t to go back up the tag stack. Ive become so used to navigating my code this way I have trouble without it.

Completion is just the way that Vim will give you completion matches in insert mode if you hit ctrl-n or ctrl-p. With C it's very smart about it and will automatically search included files. It's great for not having to worry about exact spellings on things. If you really like this sort of stuff there are a few plugins that do Textmate-like snippets.

barrkel3• 17 years ago

Of course, if you use an IDE, it can do all of this for you and much more, and more accurately than ctags.

silentbicycle10• 17 years ago

Of course, it's easier to write a program that generates tags for a new language than to build an IDE around it.

ori_b3• 17 years ago

Ctags is just as accurate at scanning C declarations as an IDE, and with a bit of vim magic, it even auto-updates when you save files.

One thing to realize is that vim IS an IDE of sorts. Only, it's far more extensible for the same effort. (although, from my brief forays with emacs, emacs certainly beats vim for extensibility)

visitor4rmindia• 17 years ago

If you like CTags give CScope a try. It's sort of like CTags on steriods. Also Vim can work with a combination of both (it loads both cTAGS and cscope.in) so you don't loose any functionality.

The biggest plus you get when using CScope is the ability to do a "reference" search. You can find all references to a given symbol in your project quickly and easily which I find invaluable for refactoring (what's going to be affected when I change this?).

dkarl3• 17 years ago

c++filt - an absolute necessity.

Also, he should have just pointed out that all IDEs are ass for C++. Java is simple enough that an IDE can be a big help, but C++ is too complicated and too slow to compile. (The remote access thing is just a matter of the work environment being adapted to one set of tools and not another -- the real issue is that text editors beat IDEs for C++.)

Otherwise, an excellent list.

silentbicycle10• 17 years ago

The real issue is that C++ is too complicated and too slow to compile.

Languages that are easier to throw together a reasonable parser for (Lisps, Smalltalk, Lua, or even C) have a much lower barrier to entry for development tools. Keeping the language syntax simple enough means that somebody scratching an itch can write something useful in an afternoon or a weekend, rather than taking a team and months.

ido• 17 years ago

> Languages that are easier to throw together a reasonable parser for (Lisps, Smalltalk, Lua, or even C)

Heck, even Java.

People (rightfully) complain a lot about how verbose some parts of java are (like how instead of anonymous functions or functions that can be passed as a parameter you have anonymous classes), but ignore the fact that the designers intentionally made that sacrifice to maintain consistency.

fix3r• 17 years ago

Actually, no. The real issue is using compiler's front-end from the IDE itself. While it's true that C++ is hugely complex IDE writers shouldn't try to replace compilers (ie. trying as hard as they might they'll never get around C++ templates and their touring-completeness). MS got this right. gcc and every IDE that relies on it (like Xcode) is crippled in this regard.

johnrob• 17 years ago

Anyone else find themselves typing this way too often?:

awk '{print $2}'

Is there a way to achieve this that's easier to type?

randomwalker• 17 years ago

cut -f 2

ori_b3• 17 years ago

cut -d'delim' -f'fieldno'

kingkongrevenge3• 17 years ago

http://perl.plover.com/classes/mybin/samples/slide010.html

bf• 17 years ago

Why are we taking C/C++ programming advice from somebody who has been doing it for just over a year?

And not to troll, but anyone who honestly believes vim is a better development environment than one of the mature Linux IDEs (Eclipse, Code::Blocks, KDevelop) is an idiot.

ramchip2• 17 years ago

I upvoted this by mistake. But I don't believe "not to troll" and "anyone who believes vim is a better environment is an idiot" can go together.

And this is coming from an emacs user ;)

davidw2• 17 years ago

Not to mention the "would you say that to someone's face?" test. There might be an argument for Eclipse (although I think it's terrible compared to Emacs:-), but calling people idiots is not the way to make that argument.

donw• 17 years ago

Linus Torvalds has pretty much always used an Emacs variant for his work on the kernel. Matz uses Emacs for his work on Ruby. DHH uses TextMate, a text editor. Pretty much every major piece of software that you can name on the Unix platform was and is developed in either Emacs or Vim.

Anybody who thinks that a text editor is better than an IDE is an idiot? I think not.

vorador5• 17 years ago

Well, some people used ed.

derwiki5• 17 years ago

If you're been doing C/C++ programming for longer than I have, this post is probably not meant for you. If you're a student who has to learn C/C++ or someone starting a job in it, then this post might be for you. This was stuff that I didn't know when I started that I wish I would have known.

And not to respond to your troll, but a lot of the more senior devs on my project (10, 15+ years) as just as efficient in vim/emacs as they would be in Eclipse. I don't think there's a one-IDE-fits all solution. Vim is certainly capable if you're willing to learn it.

eru2• 17 years ago

Yes. And there are even modifications for using the Dvorak keyboard layout with Vim.

mahmud6• 17 years ago

My development environment runs 24/7 and I can get to it from ANY machine on earth.

ssh me@mysite.com

$ screen -x

Even the cursor stays where it was between sessions.

How can I do that with ${IDE}?

eru2• 17 years ago

Shouldn't this be possible with remote sessions of X or so?

gaius• 17 years ago

VNC or RDP, to be pedantic :-)

mahmud6• 17 years ago

Worse is NOT Better; use a safe and high-performance programming language and learn its foreign-function interface to call out to C and C++. Life is too short for core-dumps and premature optimization, plus you only have two feet to shoot at.

The better designed a language the better its development process feels. You can get immersed in a lowly Lisp, J, or Forth listener. Just a little black xterm with nothing else to it, and you feel productive already (never mind the amazing environments there are for Lisp.) BADLY designed and malignant languages have 3rd party tools to augment its functionality. There are things to bolt on, hammer in and stuff to bake into the scaffolding before you stuff in boxes. The C and C++ equivalent of a listener is `cat` or maybe the system-shipped vi or nano or pico. Can you seriously feel yourself getting something done?*

* (I will answer myself and say yes; I learned Unix programming over a serial line, but it was not an immersive experience; I had books on my desk and lap and was flipping back and forth to get anything done; a masochistic sort of fun, fueled by the mischievous possibility of breaking into another account ;-)

derwiki5• 17 years ago

I didn't really mean for this to be a battle of which language is better, although I prefer not to use a screwdriver for a nail -- I'm doing systems level/kernel programming, so C makes a lot of sense.

mahmud6• 17 years ago

Point taken. Although I personally don't see C as "another" programming language, more like a system building-block, closer to a portable processor binary format :-)

When I wrote kernel modules I used C; today I'm writing an in-memory cache for a mulithreaded webserver. It has to maintain user-sesions in memory across several load-balancing servers. It has a multi-stage storage system. It has a queue manager that maintains a private queue for all concurrent users of the system; everything dynamically scheduled in realtime with a bunch of matrix munching algorithms. Allot of intricate stuff that I would have written in C when I didn't know better.

I would still write C code though, but only if I absolutely must, as in your case.

Regards.

kmavm3• 17 years ago

Since you mention core dumps, please take some unsolicited feedback from an old C programmer: the post-modern "developer productivity" family of languages' lack of core dumps is a bug, not a feature. You want core dumps. They're the right thing. They let you debug a broken program that has since been restarted, or on a different machine than the crash happened, six months afterwards.

Even if you program in a safe language, you still want assert(), and when that assert fails, you don't want an exception: once the exception has torn down a single frame it's too late, since you lose the precious "can't happen" program state.

Sure, C is a low-level language, but I think the YC consensus insufficiently weights the quality of tools supporting this ecosystem. Debuggers and profilers are indispensable, high-leverage tools for saving developer time, and the hip languages these days have followed perl's lead in just sticking -d and -p flags in the reference implementation and pretending the problem is solved.

mahmud6• 17 years ago

"the post-modern "developer productivity" family of languages' lack of core dumps is a bug"

Lisp doesn't dump core, it will drop you in a debugger prompt where you can Frankenstein your programmer to life as you wish. Forget Lisp, Scheme and other languages with full continuations will give you the entire run trace of your program in a video tape, where you rewind and fast-forward as you wish. C is not a language whose control semantics you want to brag about.

But back to Lisp, here how you "dump core" in Common Lisp: write a handler for the error condition and call SAVE-LISP from there. One line of code, left optional to the programmer.

"you still want assert(), and when that assert fails, you don't want an exception"

Yeah, it's called by the exact same name in Common Lisp.

"Debuggers and profilers are indispensable"

My Common Lisp has both a deterministic and an statical profiler. Standard Common Lisp has GC, TRACE, ROOM, DESCRIBE, APROPOS, ED, DISASSEMBLE and TIME among others. Those correspond to malloc/free, gprof, ltrace, man, apropos, vim and objdump; in the friken LANGUAGE :-) Everything is tied together with function called semantics and a memory visible to all; not with brittle "shell" languages and text parsing. The vendor and community extensions will make you weep.

There is really no point of comparing Lisp to C; you should compare Lisp to Unix.

atypic• 17 years ago

There is one thing I feel have been neglected here: Debugging.

Debugging C in Linux is a dream with gdb. Debugging (heavily templated) C++ in gdb is a nightmare.

I therefore have one additional tip, though it doesn't work in console: Run Visual Studio in wine. It's debugger can pick up running Linux processes and is awesome to work with.

messel2• 17 years ago

Great point, maybe that's why I fell in love with visual studio, the debugger?

dryicerx• 17 years ago

I feel the same way about GDB lacking in C++. I ran across project Archer... apparently better debugging support for C++

http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/ProjectArcher

davidw2• 17 years ago

strace is another extremely useful tool. Sometimes it's really nice to be able to see exactly what's happening at the OS/program boundary (what exactly are we reading from the file? from the network?), and strace can do that in a very non-intrusive way - no root reqired, no recompile required.

jbert• 17 years ago

Seconded. That apache process is chewing cpu, is it spinning in an inf loop internally to userspace? No, strace shows it repeatedly doing backend conn/op/disconnect - aha!

Another trick in this vein is/was to use 'pstack' to pull a C backtrace from a looping process. If you do that every second for 10 secs, you'll probably find where the process is looping. As a bonus, it also acts as a poor-man's-retroactive profiler (process X intermittently takes 30s to handle it's job instead of 2s - watch for one and when it happens, strobe the process with pstack to see what it's up to). Can be used in production, no need to deploy profiling build and run for ever to catch problem, etc.

(And a variant of this trick for interpreted languages is to hook an unused signal (SIGUSR2?) in your language to say "dump me a perl/python/etc backtrace to the log file". Assuming the loop is in your app code this will give you a language-level backtrace if you strobe the process with the signal)

NB1: pstack doesn't do anything which scripted gdb couldn't do, it's just more convenient

NB2: pstack is unavailable on 64-bit arches?

NB3: pstack needs some symbols to work with in the binary, which probably won't be the case with your system apache+mod_xxx

adeleinr• 17 years ago

How about ktrace, I think it is slightly better than strace

messel2• 17 years ago

I started with makefiles and emacs but fell in love with Visual C++ and eventual .NET. Netbeans is aok, but the article has prompted me to review "the impossible" and check out yet another interface.

My ideal user interface for programming? A brilliant group of younger smarter coders with better memory.

Raphael_Amiard• 17 years ago

I guess the big drawback for theses kind of tools for me is the time it takes to setup a nice developpement environnement. To fine tune my vim as i like it with ctags completion , good keybindings, a nice colorscheme and all, it takes me around 5 hours minimum.

I'm currently dev'ing for QT under QT Creator, and everything is nicely integrated, with some really neat features you can't reproduce in vim, and it even has an (incomplete) vim emulation mode !

I used to be an hardcore vim / cli fan, but i'd go back to that for nothing in the world now, at least for this current dev setup. Also i hate having to mess with makefiles.

bcl2• 17 years ago

Good list of tools. All of those usually show up on any Linux developer's list of what's in their toolbox.

gvb• 17 years ago

"diff: pretty standard utility, but this is what I use it for: I loop through all the files I’ve modified and diff to the previous version, then pipe to a grep where I can search for something I think I’ve changed but can’t remember where."

NOOOOOOooooooo. That implies he is using ad-hoc version control (uniquely named files or directories with non-revisioned copies).

Tracking and finding changes is what git is for. Commit early and often! If you mess up, it's got your back! If your compatriots use SVN, that works, but not nearly as well (when I used SVN, I would still revision control my local copies with RCS in between SVN commits). If you are developing by yourself, rcs is the minimum acceptable alternative.

What I Wish I Had Known About Developing C/C++ From Linux Before I Started

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