How to Develop C++ projects in Manjaro

How to Develop C++ projects in Manjaro? In this post I will document my process and I’m asking you, do you have some better solution? 

For C++ development we need two things: 

1. C++ compiler 
2. Some kind of development IDE 

Compile and Run C++ project in Command line

In theory, we only need C++ compiler and simple text editor to start with C++ development. For this post I’m using GCC.

The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, and D, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++,…). GCC was originally written as the compiler for the GNU operating system. The GNU system was developed to be 100% free software, free in the sense that it respects the user’s freedom.

We can install GCC on Manjaro with next command. 

sudo pacman -Sy gcc

And now we can try to create simple C hello world example and run it in command line. For this, simple example I will use nano text editor and call GCC compiler from command line. So, let’s create GCC directory with hello.c file

   mkdir GCC
   cd GCC/
   nano hello.c

and hello.c file contains:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   // printf() displays the string inside quotation
   printf("Hello World!");
   return 0;
}

And now we can simply compile for hello world example and run it with next commands.

gcc hello.c 
ls -la
./a.out

But what will happen if we try C++ hello world example hello.cpp show bellow.

#include <iostream>
int main() 
{
    std::cout << "Hello, World!"<<std::endl;
    return 0;
}

If we use the same command to compile this example we will get a error. We need to change command line to:

 g++ hello.cpp 

And for short project this can be enough. No overhead, no additional plugins and unnecessary GUI. But how complex can this be for the multiple file and all .h and .cpp file. What if we would like to debug our solution. For this reasons we use IDE and I this post I will install and configure the CodeLite.

Install CodeLite in Manjaro

This is very easy thing if first we enable the Arch User Repository of AUR. So lets enable AUR.

And now we have CodeLite installed. Now we need just to configure the CodeLite

Configure CodeLite

Create Workspace and Project

Create Workspace and then create additional Project for C++. And then setup the project like on next image:

And now we have configure CodeLite and we can try simple Hello World C++ example program. That is shown on image bellow.

And that is basically it. Now we have installed GCC compiler and CodeLite IDE that is configured to work with C++17 standard. And that is all on how to develop C++ projects in Manjaro.

Now we can start developing C++ project in Manjaro. What IDE do you use? Did you manage to follow this tutorial and install CodeLite on your PC? If you want to try this on virtual machine, take a look at my other post https://bln364.com/how-to-start-with-virtual-machines-in-2020/. And as always, see you in the next one.