C++ Development Environments

Cygwin

You probably already have Cygwin on your laptop as part of the RCS default installation. What is it? It's a UNIX environment for the Windows Operating System. You can do all of your work for this class using Cygwin, g++, and a text editor such as Emacs (in other words, you don't need to use Visual Studio). Read more about Cygwin here:

Emacs on Windows

For those of you interested in running the Emacs text editor on your Windows OS, you can download the binaries and access documentation here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html

Other text editors you may want to consider include:

VI
Vim
Textmate (commercial, OSX only)
E-texteditor (commercial, windows only)
Gedit
Programmer's Notepad (windows only)
notepad++ (windows only)

Memory Debugging

Segmentation faults and other memory bugs (reading uninitialized memory, reading/writing beyond the bounds of an array, memory leaks, etc.) can be hard to track down with a traditional debugger. We recommend Valgrind:

Valgrind (linux/FreeBSD only)
A Mac OS X port of Valgrind

However, Valgrind does not run on Windows or Cygwin. Instead, try this new tool:

Dr. Memory

C++ IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)

Here are a few C++ development environments (similar to Visual Studio) that can be used with the gcc compilers:

wxDev-C++
http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/
Eclipse
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/
Code::Blocks
http://www.codeblocks.org/
NetBeans
http://www.netbeans.org/features/cpp/
Anjuta
http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/