Tools of the Trade

Tools

Free/Open Source

• gcc - the GNU compiler (collection)

Build related

• make - GNU make - build system
• autools - autoconf, automake, libtool & co - build system

Speeding up compilations

• distcc - distributed (fast!) compilations for any network - distributing compilations to several nodes
• ccache - compiler cache, pre-compiled objects for gcc - speed up repeated compilations by using a configurable dynamic compiler cache

Documentation

• doxygen - source code documenting - automatically create source code documentation from source

Debugging

• BuGLe - OpenGL debugger
• gdb - the GNU project debugger - console debugger
• DDD - Data Display Debugger

Memory Usage

• valgrind
• memprof
• memleek

Profiling

• gprof - the GNU profiler - profiling
• rapido x86 profiler

Source Code Management / Revision Control Systems

• CVS - Concurrent Versioning System
  • http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html
  • http://www.cs.utah.edu/dept/old/texinfo/cvs/cvs_toc.html
  • http://www.wincvs.org/
• SVN
  • http://www.subversion.org
• git
  • http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

fraps-like Output/Video capturing for *nix

• http://www.opengl.org/sdk/tools/BuGLe/
• http://www.neopsis.com/projects/yukon/ [1]
• http://dbservice.com/projects/seom/
• http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul
• http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/
• http://gizmothunder.blogspot.com/2006/09/fraps-in-linux.html

Other tools (proprietary but freely available)

Debuggers & Profilers

• AMD's Developer Tools (CodeAnalyst, available for free for Win32/Linux )
• Sun Thread Analyzer - for Linux: supports Intel x86 & AMD64 platforms (part of Sun Studio Express)
• Intel VTune (free Win32/Linux versions available for non-commercial use:requires an INTEL CPU!)
• Intel Thread Analysis & Profiling Tools

IDEs

• MSVC++ Express 2008 [2] - please note that you'll probably want to download the offline installation image file (iso) which -unlike the web installation- doesn't require any complicated and long-winded registration process. The direct link to the latest version (as of 11/2008) is [3] - after having downloaded the iso image, you'll either have to burn it or simply mount it in order to execute the installation (there are various tools to mount iso images under windows, you may want to check out daemon tools [4] for a freely available solution).

If you are lost see Portal:User or Portal:Developer