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Developer Environment

This part is optional and only gives some advice for your developer environment, especially if you want to be multi-platform. I present here my own developer environment.

Compiler

On Linux I use gcc, the most recent version if possible.

On Windows I use Visual Studio Community 2019, which can be downloaded from the microsoft website. However I don't use the IDE, only the compiler, and I build from command line with cmake --build.

Another good choice can be clang I guess, which is multi-platform, but I never tried it.

Editor

I use VS Code because:

  • Open source, but maintained by a very active team from Microsoft
  • Multiplatform
  • Built with web technologies, but quite fast
  • Extensibility with extensions
  • A lot of extensions already available
  • Integration with debuggers
  • Multi languages
  • Native markdown support

The C/C++ extension of VS Code is now mature enough, in my opinion, to stop using heavy IDEs like Visual Studio.

VS Code Extensions

The code template provides recommanded extensions in .vscode/extensions.json

Windows Dev Env, what other tools ?

  • MSYS2 is my terminal
  • Cmder is my terminal launcher (quake style dropdown ftw)
  • Scoop is my installation manager (if a software is available in Scoop, I install it with Scoop)
  • Everything is my file searcher