Tools of the Trade

Tools

Misc tools (proprietary but freely available)

IDEs

• Microsoft Visual Studio Community [1] - the modern version of Microsoft's IDE. The Community edition is free.
• 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).

Shader Development

• RenderMonkey
• FX Composer (Windows)

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

OpenGL Debugging

• GLIntercept (Open Source OpenGL Debugger with built-in shader editor)
• glslDevil OpenGL GLSL Debugger

Free/Open Source

• gcc - the GNU compiler (collection)
• Visual Studio Code - a modern, lightweight, open source code editor

Build related

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

Speeding up compilations/rebuilds

• ccache - compiler cache, pre-compiled objects for gcc - speed up repeated compilations by using a configurable dynamic compiler cache
• distcc - distributed (fast!) compilations for any network - distributing compilations to several nodes
• Using TMPFS-based ram drives to speed up compilations:
  • TMPFS
  • How to Create and Mount a TMPFS File System
  • Create turbocharged storage using tmpfs
• Using the GNU Gold Linker to speed up link times on ELF platforms by a factor of up to 5:
  • Striking gold in binutils
  • Testing the new "gold" linker from binutils

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
• memleak

Profiling

• gprof - the GNU profiler - profiling
• rapido x86 profiler
• Built-in Profiler (using google perftools)
• KCacheGrind, front-end for valgrind's callgrind. Very reliable tool, produces nice little colourful graphs too. Linux only.

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
  • https://git-scm.com/
  • http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

fraps-like Output/Video capturing for *nix

• http://pigeond.net/flightgear/screenstreamer/
• http://www.opengl.org/sdk/tools/BuGLe/
• https://github.com/wereHamster/yukon [5]
• https://github.com/wereHamster/seom
• http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul
• http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/
• http://gizmothunder.blogspot.com/2006/09/fraps-in-linux.html