IDEs

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provides a convenient visual environment for developing and debugging code. While there are other popular options such as VS Code, we will be focussing on the two shown below.

Mac Users

  • XCode is a powerful C++ development environment that comes built in, though you have to go through a few installation steps.

  • Installation of Xcode can be a bit confusing, so you may want to follow a set of instructions such as these alternatives.

  • See this 8 min YouTube video on how to create and run your first C/C++ program within Xcode.

  • See where to put your data files in Xcode so your program can read from them.

Everyone (Windows / Mac / Linux)

  • JetBrains' CLion IDE includes a nice debugger and offers the CLion development environment free to all students. There are two major parts to the installation:

      1. First create a JetBrains Academic account. Then download and install the product you want (CLion in this case). After installation when you first run it you'll be prompted to enter your JetBrains account information, which will allow you to use it free for a year, at which point you can renew it and keep using it as an academic user.

      2. Follow these installation instructions or alternatively follow the instructions in this video, where in particular you should pay attention at 2:43 to the details on how you must also install a compiler, such as MinGW.

      3. CLion currently has an issue on Windows where the result of print statements are buffered and don't show up in the console when debugging. To fix this, at the top of your program make sure you have:
         #include <stdio.h>

and then first thing in main() add this line to disable output buffer size to 0:
 setbuf( stdout, 0);