Platform

Synopsis:

If you want to participate in this course interactively (and I hope you will) you need to set up a development environment to build code I give you, to modify and rebuild, and to create some original code.

The purpose of this page is to help you do that. You can set up a Minimal Linux Toolchain to compile using the terminal by manually running either g++ or clang++. It doesn't really matter which you choose. You can partially automate that by creating makefiles and running them with the make utility that comes with compiler toolchains.

You can also download the Netbeans IDE, configured for C++. That allows you to create, build, edit, and debug code all in one environment. There are two advantages in doing that: it's fairly easy to organize projects that include multiple packages, and the IDE provides syntactic hints that help you quickly identify problems with your use of the C++ language.

Finally, for the really ambitious, you can download and install on Windows the Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. I will do some of the course demonstrations in Visual Studio, so that will let you follow along if you wish.

Note, that simply using the Minimal Linux Toolchain will be an effective way to participate in this course. The Netbeans and Visual Studio IDEs are powerful, but anything you can do with them, for this course, you can also do with the Minimal Toolchain.

  1. Linux Distribution

  2. Minimal Linux Toolchain for C++ builds:

    • clang 3.5:
      Available from the default repositories: sudo apt-get install clang-3.5
    • g++ 5.1:
      Available from ubuntu-toolchain-r/test repository: instructions
    • gedit
      Part of the standard Mint distribution (probably common to all the Debian-based distributions)
    • make:
      Part of the clang and g++ distributions. Need help? make tutorial, Makefiles in Linux - CodeProject

  3. Other Linux Tools:

    • Netbeans IDE: download provides an installation script you make executable and run.

      You'll need openjdk-7-jdk and openjdk-7-jre, as Netbeans was written in Java. These should be available in the default repositories but are probably already installed in your Linux distribution.

    • dropbox: download. You will need to sign in or create a new account to install.

      Be careful not to link to a dropbox account that has a lot of files - you can blow out your VM's limited virtual disk space.

    • Filezilla: download

  4. Windows Build Tools:

    • Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition: download

      Powerful IDE supporting C++, C#, F#, .... Runs on Windows but can target Linux and IOS.

I've included links for downloading dropbox and filezilla (you only need one) that make it easy to exchange files between your laptop host and a Linux distribution running in a VM.