Monday, January 24, 2011

C Development Tools

C Development Tools

Life changed for C and C++ Developers with the arrival of CDT for Eclipse. Eclipse is one of the most famous IDEs (Integrated development environments) based in plugin approach architecture allowing to program in different technologies and languages under the same graphical framework.

CDT is an open source plugin that enhance Eclipse with the needed features to develop in C and C++ both large and small projects. It brings all the typical characteristics of an IDE (Syntax highlighting, Code completion etc) and it can be of course combined with other external tools like control version systems (CVS, SVN etc).

A. Installing Eclipse.

You have basically two ways to install Eclipse:

The classical one (Synaptic → Eclipse) and

Directly downloading from Eclipse download page (Eclipse for C/C++ Developers).

If you choose the second option, you can download the version that includes CDT from the Eclipse download page (See Fig.1) and therefore you can avoid the “Installing CDT” step, but if you are planning on download a whole Eclipse for each feature that you need you will probably waste a lot of space in your hard disk. Therefore I recommend you to choose the first option.

Fig.1 Eclipse download page

B. Installing CDT.

If you choose the first option, you need to follow a couple of extra steps to install an run CDT:

1. Go to the download main page of the CDT Project and log the repository version that you need. In my case I am going to install it on a Eclipse Galileo (Is the one that is installed by default in Ubuntu 10.04) so my repository is http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/galileo

2. Open Eclipse and click on Help –> Install New Software. A new windows is opened, just paste the repository address in the first text box (See fig.2) and wait until the CDT Installation packages appears.

Fig.2 Adding CDT to Eclipse

3. Select both installation packages (CDT Main Features and CDT Optional Features) and click Next. Leave the next screens as it appears and if you do not receive any error message it means that CDT is now installed and integrated in your Eclipse.

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