Environment Setup

I can not stress enough how important having a good environment setup is for me. Traditionally, I’m a Go developer so getting a similar setup working in C++ will help ease me in. I also use VSCode, so having something working there where I can have my tests and the ability to debug is key. Luckily these days VSCode has pretty good C++ and CMake support.

The environment

I’ve used CMake in the past for various projects but never took the time to really learn how to structure / use it properly. I came across a great article on modern cmake that really cleared up a lot of things and gave me a good starting point for structuring this project. I highly recommend reading that page if you are diving in to c++ with CMake.

So the way it’s structured is:

- apps/: where you put your code to compile binaries
- src/: where you put your library code
- tests/: yehp, tests

I deviated a bit from their example project by not having a separate include directory. I did this because I’m not going to be building a library to distribute and I’d rather have header files alongside source files as that’s traditionally how I’ve done C++.

Getting VSCode Setup

I actually run linux via windows WSL2, so I want to make sure tests work as well as debugging. I installed the following VSCode extensions:

C/C++ Obviously
CMake tools For CMake integration
C++ TestMate For testing (supports Catch2 and GoogleTest)

The modern cmake article suggested Catch2 for testing, so I’m giving that a shot, seems to work nicely and I have a lovely testing UI now!

I can also run tests by going into the build directory and running ctest.

$ ctest
Test project /home/wirepair/netcode/pmo/build
    Start 1: testlibtest
1/1 Test #1: testlibtest ......................   Passed    0.00 sec

100% tests passed, 0 tests failed out of 1

Total Test time (real) =   0.00 sec

Getting debugging working was a bit more work. Here’s the following configs:

launch.json

{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "C/C++: cpp build and debug active file",
            "type": "cppdbg",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${fileDirname}/${fileBasenameNoExtension}",
            "args": [],
            "stopAtEntry": false,
            "cwd": "${fileDirname}",
            "environment": [],
            "externalConsole": false,
            "MIMode": "gdb",
            "setupCommands": [
                {
                    "description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
                    "text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
                    "ignoreFailures": true
                },
                {
                    "description": "Set Disassembly Flavor to Intel",
                    "text": "-gdb-set disassembly-flavor intel",
                    "ignoreFailures": true
                }
            ],
            "preLaunchTask": "C/C++: cpp build active file",
            "miDebuggerPath": "/usr/bin/gdb"
        }
    ],
    "version": "2.0.0"
}

settings.json

{
    "cmake.configureOnOpen": true
}

tasks.json

{
    "tasks": [
        {
            "type": "cppbuild",
            "label": "C/C++: cpp build active file",
            "command": "/usr/bin/cpp",
            "args": [
                "-fdiagnostics-color=always",
                "-g",
                "${file}",
                "-o",
                "${fileDirname}/${fileBasenameNoExtension}"
            ],
            "options": {
                "cwd": "${fileDirname}"
            },
            "problemMatcher": [
                "$gcc"
            ],
            "group": "build",
            "detail": "Task generated by Debugger."
        }
    ],
    "version": "2.0.0"
}

So now to debug I just have to do ctrl + p > CMake: Debug and it launches the integrated gdb debugger for me.

So yeah, that’s the environment, feel free to follow along I’m going to do all this open source style.