Setting Up Your Environment

If you’d like to develop your C programs on your own hardware, here’s some tips for getting your environment set up. Remember, the CS lab machines are where we grade your assignments, so you are responsible for making sure they work there.

macOS

On macOS, you’ll need either:

• XCode from the app store (this includes the C compiler and related tools)
• The command-line developer tools (run xcode-select --install from your terminal and follow the instructions)

To test that everything is working correctly, run ‘gcc’ or ‘clang’ in your terminal.

Windows

Development on Windows can be tricky. One way to avoid a lot of headaches is to use a virtual machine. Here’s instructions for setting up a Linux VM on Windows

If you aren’t interested in using a Linux VM, you’ll need something along the lines of Cygwin or MinGW. This will give you a (mostly) standard UNIX development tool chain on Windows. Be sure to enable the ‘Devel/gcc-core’ and ‘Devel/make’ packages to pull in gcc and related tools on Cygwin.

Linux

Linux is the least painful to set up. Many distributions already include development tools, but installing gcc with your package manager should pull in the rest of the required dependencies. The lab machines are already configured correctly for C development.

If you can’t get your own environment set up, you can always make use of the CS lab machines (either on campus or remotely – see http://www.cs.usfca.edu/support.html).

Text Editors

Many students develop their C programs with text editors such as Sublime Text, Atom, or VS Code. These are all good options. In general, you’ll have an editor window open as well as a terminal so that you can compile, test, and edit your code. Something like this:

You may also want to get familiar with a terminal-based editor such as vim or emacs. Lots of tutorials are available online, and learning a terminal editor can be extremely useful.

There are also plenty of IDEs that work well with C…

CLion

Once you’ve installed the dependencies above, you should be good to go. On Windows, just point CLion to your installation of Cygwin.

Eclipse

When using Eclipse, be aware of the following:

• Use the gcc available for your platform, not the ‘Cross gcc’ option when creating a project.
• You will need to build your program (Project > Build) before you can run it.

Command Line

To make sure you have a compiler installed and configured correctly, just run ‘gcc’ at the command line. You can compile your program with

gcc prog_name.c

And then run with

./a.out

You can also specify a name for your executable (a.out is just the default), and show all compiler warning messages. ‘-Wall’ turns on all warnings, and ‘-o’ specifies the output file:

gcc -Wall prog_name.c -o my_program
./my_program