Cross Platform C++ Tool Chain

Question

Hello I am putting together a tool chain on my windows Box for Cross Platform C++ Development. I plan on using Boost.Build for building and Boost::Test for unit testing. I will be using Mercurial for my VCS because I can just throw the repo on my external HD and then pull it to either my windows or linux partition. The main thing standing in my way is editor compiler/debugger. Anyone have any suggestions?

With Boost.Build I can technically build with whatever compilers it supports easily. That means MSVC on windows and GCC on linux by using the same script with a flag.

Answer 1

Code::Blocks is a free, open source, cross platform C++ IDE. It supports the MS and GCC compilers, among others.

Answer 2

you can use gcc/g++ on windows as well. as for debuggers: gdb and ddd might be in cygwin. editor: vim (beware: it's really a programmable editor, not an IDE).

Answer 3

Qt Creator using MinGW on Windows and the GNU compiler on Linux. That's what I use and it works perfectly well. Note that you don't have to use Qt when developing with Qt Creator.

Answer 4

The main thing standing in my way is editor compiler/debugger. Anyone have any suggestions?

Yes: Qt Creator as one download and install will satisfy your three requests -- pick the 'LGPL' license route and download and install the SDK which even installs gcc, g++, ... for you. The integrated debugger is very good, and you get cross-platform behavior from both your code and your tools.

Answer 5

Vim, gdb, gcc/g++, makefile - you can use them on both - Windows and Unix :)

Yet another vote for Code Blocks or Qt Creator.

There are commercial tools too: beside Visual Studio there are MagicC++ (IDE), debuggers like TotalView, Allinea, Zero-bugs, UndoDB ... if you want to stay with VStudio check these VSBridge and WinGDB.

Anyway you can always use MSVC on Windows and other tools on Unix (gdb/DDD for debugging, vim/emacs for edition) - I've worked in this way a lot of years. Common environment for all platforms is nice, but sometimes it is very hard (almost impossible) to "force" it in company (especially big-company) ;-)

Answer 6

May I suggest CMake on Windows and Linux as you can generate native Visual Studio projects as well as Eclipse CDT projects and plain-old makefiles.

If you are targeting multiple platforms, but find yourself primarily developing on a single platform, I highly recommend a continuous build/integration system to ensure a check-in for one platform does not break the build on the others.