C++ Automatic Comment Documentation

Question

When I work on C# projects, I can use Microsoft's SandCastle application to generate nice, easy to read and use documentation for my entire code base. I'm curious: Does such an automagic documentation method exist for native C++ applications?

Answer 1

Look up on doxygen.

Answer 2

I think you're talking about Doxygen.

Answer 3

Yes, you can use doxygen.

It's using Javadoc-style or QT-style comments (you can choose), to generate the documentation.

Answer 4

I have used Doxygen in the past, and it quite effective.

Answer 5

There is also doxys a development of doxygen that is slightly better at C++

Answer 6

As everyone has said, doxygen is an excellent equivalent of SandCastle, and it can support the same XML-based format as Sandacastle, so you don't even need to use a different doc-comment style if you wish.

To make creating the help comments much faster and easier, I've written a very handy free addin: AtomineerUtils. This works for C#, C++ and C with DocXML and Doxygen format comments and does a lot of the work for you, automatically generating good base documentation from your naming, detecting and documenting thrown exceptions, and keeping the comments tidy with word wrapping, etc.