Tools of the Trade

Misc tools (proprietary but freely available)

IDEs

• Microsoft Visual Studio Community [1] - the modern version of Microsoft's IDE. The Community edition is free.
• Visual Studio Code [2] - lightweight, cross-platform, open-source code editor with excellent C/C++ support via extensions.

Shader Development

• RenderDoc - modern, open-source GPU debugger that supports shader debugging (Vulkan, D3D11/12, OpenGL, OpenGL ES).
• Nsight Graphics (NVIDIA) - powerful GPU shader debugging and profiling tool.
• AMD Radeon GPU Profiler - AMD's modern replacement for RenderMonkey/FX Composer.

Debuggers & Profilers

• AMD uProf - AMD's modern performance profiler (replaces CodeAnalyst).
• Intel Advisor & Intel VTune Profiler - modern performance and threading profilers. Free tier available for students, open-source, and evaluation.
• ThreadSanitizer (TSan) - modern thread race and deadlock detector (part of LLVM/Clang).

OpenGL Debugging

• RenderDoc - OpenGL/OpenGL ES debugger (fully replaces GLIntercept/glslDevil).
• RenderDoc on GitHub - actively maintained, open source.

Free/Open Source

• GCC - GNU Compiler Collection - actively maintained.
• Clang/LLVM - modern, fast, open-source C/C++ compiler.
• Visual Studio Code - modern, lightweight, open source code editor.

Build related

• CMake - modern cross-platform build system (replaces autotools for many projects).
• Meson - fast, user-friendly build system.
• Ninja - small, fast build system focused on speed.
• GNU make - still widely used, but often invoked via CMake/Meson.

Speeding up compilations/rebuilds

• ccache - compiler cache for GCC/Clang/MSVC. Actively maintained.
• distcc - distributed compilation (still maintained).
• sccache - similar to ccache, with cloud storage support (modern alternative).
• icecream - modern distributed compilation system.
• Using tmpfs/ram drives for compilation speed (still relevant on HDDs; less critical on NVMe SSDs):
  • tmpfs documentation
• LLD - LLVM's linker, significantly faster than GNU ld or Gold.

Documentation

• Doxygen - still actively maintained and widely used for source code documentation.
• MkDocs or Sphinx - modern alternatives for documentation generation.

Debugging

• GDB - still the standard console debugger.
• cgdb - modern curses-based GDB frontend (replaces DDD).
• rr - lightweight recording/debugging for Linux (modern replacement for many DDD use cases).
• Insiomnia (moved to SymBreak) - modern debugger for Linux from Microsoft.

Memory Usage

• Valgrind - still useful, though slower.
• AddressSanitizer (ASan) - modern, fast memory error detector (part of GCC/Clang).
• LeakSanitizer (LSan) - memory leak detector.
• Hotspot - modern GUI for performance/memory analysis.

Profiling

• perf - Linux's built-in profiler (replaces gprof).
• FlameGraphs - visualize perf data.
• libfaketime - time manipulation for testing.
• trace-viewer / Perfetto - modern tracing.
• speedscope - fast, interactive flamegraph viewer.

Source Code Management / Revision Control Systems

• git - modern standard for version control.
• Subversion (SVN) - for legacy projects.
• Mercurial - alternative distributed VCS.