Как подключить gcc к visual studio
Я создаю очень большой проект (несколько тысяч строк) и так что бы не использовать Notepad++. IDE сделает это намного проще. У меня есть опыт работы с Microsoft Visual Studio и мне это нравится. Есть ли простой способ использовать GCC Cygwin из Microsoft Visual Studio?
альтернативно, есть ли другие хорошие идентификаторы Windows для GCC, кроме NetBeans и Eclipse? (Я страстно ненавижу их обоих.)
Вариант 1: Создайте пользовательский инструмент сборки
насколько я знаю, никто еще не сделал этого для GCC. И, делая это самостоятельно, требуется написать COM-код, который, вероятно, слишком глубок для погружения в бассейн только для одного проекта. У тебя должна быть веская причина, чтобы взяться за этот проект.
затем вам нужно вручную настроить каждый проект, чтобы он использовал пользовательский инструмент сборки вместо стандартного, так как вы используете расширение имени файла ( .cpp , вероятно), о котором Visual C++ уже знает. Вы столкнетесь с проблемами, если попытаетесь смешать компиляторы VC++ и g++ для одного исполняемого файла, построенного из нескольких модулей.
С другой стороны, если вы хотите начать проект с открытым исходным кодом, это звучит как хорошая для меня. Я ожидаю, что вы быстро соберете большую базу пользователей.
Вариант 2: Проект Makefile
запустите Visual Studio и скажите Файл > Новый проект.
в разделе Visual C++ выберите проект Makefile
не устанавливайте флажок, предлагающий проверить проект в систему управления версиями, если вы используете Visual Studio Express. Если вы не платите за Visual Studio, вы, вероятно, также решили не платить за дорогостоящие "решения" Microsoft, и VSE не поддерживает сторонние VCS плагины, такие как AnkhSVN на в Subversion.
заполните мастер проекта Makefile:
- построить командную строку: сделать
- чистый команды: чистые
- перестроить командную строку: сделать очистить все
оставить выход (для отладки) только поле, если вы не делаете что-то странное, например, не называя исполняемый файл после имени проекта или помещая имя исполняемого файла где-то, кроме верхнего уровня проекта.
оставьте остальные поля в покое, если вы не знаете, что они такое и почему вы хотите их изменить. Так же, как пример, вы можете выбрать, чтобы передать -D флаг на определения препроцессора line для получения отдельных отладочных и выпускных выходов. Если вы знаете, что хотите этого, вы знаете, как это устроить, поэтому я не собираюсь делать этот длинный ответ еще дольше, чтобы объяснить его. (И если вы не знаете, как, но хотите, это, вероятно, хорошая тема для нового вопроса SO!)
вам будет задан тот же набор вопросов для сборки выпуска. Если вы хотите возиться с отдельными сборками отладки и выпуска, вы должны внести любые изменения здесь.
сделав все это, вы все равно должны создать Makefile и добавить make.exe на PATH . Как и в случае с отладки и вопрос освобождения, идя в том, что уровень детализации будет толкать этот ответ не по теме.
как бы уродливо это ни выглядело, это все равно проще, чем создавать пользовательские инструменты сборки. Кроме того, вы говорите, что вам нужно портировать в Unix в конце концов, поэтому вам понадобится это Makefile в любом случае.
Вариант 3: Кросс-Платформенная Разработка
вы скажем, вы хотите перенести эту программу в Unix в какой-то момент, но это не означает, что вы должны использовать GCC в Windows сейчас. Вполне возможно написать вашу программу так, чтобы она строилась под Visual C++ на Windows и gcc/Makefiles на системах *ix.
есть даже несколько инструментов, которые делают это проще, создавая файлы VS project и Makefile S из одного общего источника. Я использую Bakefile, а CMake становится все более популярным в последние годы. проектов SCons также выполняет эту работу и, вероятно, также более популярен, чем Bakefile; он, безусловно, обновляется чаще.
Я продолжаю (тыкать) цепочку инструментов C / C++, используя Визуальный Код на Win / Lin / Mac и MinGW, установленных из Choclatey. (Это было сделано для моего здравомыслия - установите GDB и GCC, как вы хотите)
Я запустил его с GCC и GDB с IntelliSense, используя собственные странные JSON-файлы MS. Когда-нибудь, кто-нибудь (вы?) напишет скрипт Gradle или Python для их генерации; пока примеры в интернете в документах кажется работать.
In this tutorial, you will configure Visual Studio Code to use the GCC C++ compiler (g++) and GDB debugger on Ubuntu in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection; GDB is the GNU debugger. WSL is a Linux environment within Windows that runs directly on the machine hardware, not in a virtual machine.
Note: Much of this tutorial is applicable to working with C++ and VS Code directly on a Linux machine.
Visual Studio Code has support for working directly in WSL with the Remote - WSL extension. We recommend this mode of WSL development, where all your source code files, in addition to the compiler, are hosted on the Linux distro. For more background, see VS Code Remote Development.
After completing this tutorial, you will be ready to create and configure your own C++ project, and to explore the VS Code documentation for further information about its many features. This tutorial does not teach you about GCC or Linux or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.
If you have any problems, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.
Prerequisites
To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following steps:
Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and then use the links on that same page to install your Linux distribution of choice. This tutorial uses Ubuntu. During installation, remember your Linux user password because you'll need it to install additional software.
Set up your Linux environment
Open the Bash shell for WSL. If you installed an Ubuntu distro, type "Ubuntu" in the Windows search box and then click on it in the result list. For Debian, type "Debian", and so on.
The shell appears with a command prompt that by default consists of your user name and computer name, and puts you in your home directory. For Ubuntu it looks like this:
Make a directory called projects and then subdirectory under that called helloworld :
Although you will be using VS Code to edit your source code, you'll be compiling the source code on Linux using the g++ compiler. You'll also debug on Linux using GDB. These tools are not installed by default on Ubuntu, so you have to install them. Fortunately, that task is quite easy!
From the WSL command prompt, first run apt-get update to update the Ubuntu package lists. An out-of-date distro can sometimes interfere with attempts to install new packages.
If you like, you can run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to also download the latest versions of the system packages, but this can take significantly longer depending on your connection speed.
From the command prompt, install the GNU compiler tools and the GDB debugger by typing:
Verify that the install succeeded by locating g++ and gdb. If the filenames are not returned from the whereis command, try running the update command again.
Note: The setup steps for installing the g++ compiler and GDB debugger apply if you are working directly on a Linux machine rather than in WSL. Running VS Code in your helloworld project, as well as the editing, building, and debugging steps are the same.
Run VS Code in WSL
Navigate to your helloworld project folder and launch VS Code from the WSL terminal with code . :
You'll see a message about "Installing VS Code Server". VS Code is downloading and installing a small server on the Linux side that the desktop VS Code will then talk to. VS Code will then start and open the helloWorld folder. The File Explorer shows that VS Code is now running in the context of WSL with the title bar [WSL: Ubuntu].
You can also tell the remote context from the Status bar.
If you click on the Remote Status bar item, you will see a dropdown of Remote commands appropriate for the session. For example, if you want to end your session running in WSL, you can select the Close Remote Connection command from the dropdown. Running code . from your WSL command prompt will restart VS Code running in WSL.
The code . command opened VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your "workspace". As you go through the tutorial, you will see three files created in a .vscode folder in the workspace:
- c_cpp_properties.json (compiler path and IntelliSense settings)
- tasks.json (build instructions)
- launch.json (debugger settings)
Add a source code file
In the File Explorer title bar, select the New File button and name the file helloworld.cpp .
Install the C/C++ extension
Once you create the file and VS Code detects it is a C++ language file, you may be prompted to install the Microsoft C/C++ extension if you don't already have it installed.
Choose Install and then Reload Required when the button is displayed in the Extensions view to complete installing the C/C++ extension.
If you already have C/C++ language extensions installed locally in VS Code, you'll need to go to the Extensions view ( ⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X ) ) and install those extensions into WSL. Locally installed extensions can be installed into WSL by selecting the Install in WSL button and then Reload Required.
Add hello world source code
Now paste in this source code:
Now press ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+S ) to save the file. Notice how the file you just added appears in the File Explorer view ( ⇧⌘E (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+E ) ) in the side bar of VS Code:
You can also enable Auto Save to automatically save your file changes, by checking Auto Save in the main File menu.
The Activity Bar on the far left lets you open different views such as Search, Source Control, and Run. You'll look at the Run view later in this tutorial. You can find out more about the other views in the VS Code User Interface documentation.
Explore IntelliSense
In your new helloworld.cpp file, hover over vector or string to see type information. After the declaration of the msg variable, start typing msg. as you would when calling a member function. You should immediately see a completion list that shows all the member functions, and a window that shows the type information for the msg object:
You can press the Tab key to insert the selected member; then, when you add the opening parenthesis, you will see information about any arguments that the function requires.
Build helloworld.cpp
Next, you will create a tasks.json file to tell VS Code how to build (compile) the program. This task will invoke the g++ compiler on WSL to create an executable file based on the source code.
From the main menu, choose Terminal > Configure Default Build Task. In the dropdown, which will display a tasks dropdown listing various predefined build tasks for C++ compilers. Choose g++ build active file, which will build the file that is currently displayed (active) in the editor.
This will create a tasks.json file in a .vscode folder and open it in the editor.
Your new tasks.json file should look similar to the JSON below:
The command setting specifies the program to run; in this case that is g++. The args array specifies the command-line arguments that will be passed to g++. These arguments must be specified in the order expected by the compiler. This task tells g++ to take the active file ( $ ), compile it, and create an executable file in the current directory ( $ ) with the same name as the active file but without an extension ( $ ), resulting in helloworld for our example.
Note: You can learn more about tasks.json variables in the variables reference.
The label value is what you will see in the tasks list; you can name this whatever you like.
The "isDefault": true value in the group object specifies that this task will be run when you press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) . This property is for convenience only; if you set it to false, you can still run it from the Terminal menu with Tasks: Run Build Task.
Running the build
Go back to helloworld.cpp . Your task builds the active file and you want to build helloworld.cpp .
To run the build task defined in tasks.json , press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) or from the Terminal main menu choose Tasks: Run Build Task.
When the task starts, you should see the Integrated Terminal panel appear below the source code editor. After the task completes, the terminal shows output from the compiler that indicates whether the build succeeded or failed. For a successful g++ build, the output looks something like this:
Create a new terminal using the + button and you'll have a bash terminal running in the context of WSL with the helloworld folder as the working directory. Run ls and you should now see the executable helloworld (no file extension).
You can run helloworld in the terminal by typing ./helloworld .
Modifying tasks.json
You can modify your tasks.json to build multiple C++ files by using an argument like "$/*.cpp" instead of $ . You can also modify the output filename by replacing "$/$" with a hard-coded filename (for example 'helloworld.out').
Debug helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a launch.json file to configure VS Code to launch the GDB debugger when you press F5 to debug the program.
From the main menu, choose Run > Add Configuration. . VS Code creates an empty launch.json file. Copy and paste the following configuration into launch.json :
The program setting specifies the program you want to debug. Here it is set to the active file folder $ and active filename without an extension $ , which if helloworld.cpp is the active file will be helloworld .
By default, the C++ extension won't add any breakpoints to your source code and the stopAtEntry value is set to false . Change the stopAtEntry value to true to cause the debugger to stop on the main method when you start debugging.
The remaining steps are provided as an optional exercise to help you get familiar with the editing and debugging experience.
Start a debugging session
- Go back to helloworld.cpp so that it is the active file.
- Press F5 or from the main menu choose Run > Start Debugging. Before you start stepping through the code, let's take a moment to notice several changes in the user interface:
The Integrated Terminal appears at the bottom of the source code editor. In the Debug Output tab, you see output that indicates the debugger is up and running.
The editor highlights the first statement in the main method. This is a breakpoint that the C++ extension automatically sets for you:
The Run view on the left shows debugging information. You'll see an example later in the tutorial.
At the top of the code editor, a debugging control panel appears. You can move this around the screen by grabbing the dots on the left side.
Step through the code
Now you're ready to start stepping through the code.
Click or press the Step over icon in the debugging control panel.
This will advance program execution to the first line of the for loop, and skip over all the internal function calls within the vector and string classes that are invoked when the msg variable is created and initialized. Notice the change in the Variables window on the left.
In this case, the errors are expected because, although the variable names for the loop are now visible to the debugger, the statement has not executed yet, so there is nothing to read at this point. The contents of msg are visible, however, because that statement has completed.
Press Step over again to advance to the next statement in this program (skipping over all the internal code that is executed to initialize the loop). Now, the Variables window shows information about the loop variables.
Press Step over again to execute the cout statement. (Note that as of the March 2019 release, the C++ extension does not print any output to the Debug Console until the loop exits.)
If you like, you can keep pressing Step over until all the words in the vector have been printed to the console. But if you are curious, try pressing the Step Into button to step through source code in the C++ standard library!
To return to your own code, one way is to keep pressing Step over. Another way is to set a breakpoint in your code by switching to the helloworld.cpp tab in the code editor, putting the insertion point somewhere on the cout statement inside the loop, and pressing F9 . A red dot appears in the gutter on the left to indicate that a breakpoint has been set on this line.
Then press F5 to start execution from the current line in the standard library header. Execution will break on cout . If you like, you can press F9 again to toggle off the breakpoint.
When the loop has completed, you can see the output in the Debug Console tab of the integrated terminal, along with some other diagnostic information that is output by GDB.
Set a watch
Sometimes you might want to keep track of the value of a variable as your program executes. You can do this by setting a watch on the variable.
Place the insertion point inside the loop. In the Watch window, click the plus sign and in the text box, type word , which is the name of the loop variable. Now view the Watch window as you step through the loop.
Add another watch by adding this statement before the loop: int i = 0; . Then, inside the loop, add this statement: ++i; . Now add a watch for i as you did in the previous step.
To quickly view the value of any variable while execution is paused on a breakpoint, you can hover over it with the mouse pointer.
C/C++ configurations
If you want more control over the C/C++ extension, you can create a c_cpp_properties.json file, which will allow you to change settings such as the path to the compiler, include paths, C++ standard (default is C++17), and more.
You can view the C/C++ configuration UI by running the command C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI) from the Command Palette ( ⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P ) ).
This opens the C/C++ Configurations page. When you make changes here, VS Code writes them to a file called c_cpp_properties.json in the .vscode folder.
You only need to modify the Include path setting if your program includes header files that are not in your workspace or in the standard library path.
Visual Studio Code places these settings in .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json . If you open that file directly, it should look something like this:
Closing the WSL session
When you are done working in WSL, you can close your remote session with the Close Remote Connection command available in the main File menu and the Command Palette ( ⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P ) ). This will restart VS Code running locally. You can easily reopen your WSL session from the File > Open Recent list by selecting folders with the [WSL] suffix.
In this tutorial, you configure Visual Studio Code to use the GCC C++ compiler (g++) and GDB debugger from mingw-w64 to create programs that run on Windows.
After configuring VS Code, you will compile and debug a simple Hello World program in VS Code. This tutorial does not teach you about GCC, GDB, Mingw-w64, or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.
If you have any problems, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.
Prerequisites
To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following steps:
Install the C/C++ extension for VS Code. You can install the C/C++ extension by searching for 'c++' in the Extensions view ( ⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X ) ).
Get the latest version of Mingw-w64 via MSYS2, which provides up-to-date native builds of GCC, Mingw-w64, and other helpful C++ tools and libraries. You can download the latest installer from the MSYS2 page or use this link to the installer.
Follow the Installation instructions on the MSYS2 website to install Mingw-w64. Take care to run each required Start menu and pacman command, especially Step 7, when you will install the actual Mingw-w64 toolset ( pacman -S --needed base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain ).
Add the path to your Mingw-w64 bin folder to the Windows PATH environment variable by using the following steps:
- In the Windows search bar, type 'settings' to open your Windows Settings.
- Search for Edit environment variables for your account.
- Choose the Path variable in your User variables and then select Edit.
- Select New and add the Mingw-w64 destination folder path to the system path. The exact path depends on which version of Mingw-w64 you have installed and where you installed it. If you used the settings above to install Mingw-w64, then add this to the path: C:\msys64\mingw64\bin .
- Select OK to save the updated PATH. You will need to reopen any console windows for the new PATH location to be available.
Check your MinGW installation
To check that your Mingw-w64 tools are correctly installed and available, open a new Command Prompt and type:
If you don't see the expected output or g++ or gdb is not a recognized command, make sure your PATH entry matches the Mingw-w64 binary location where the compilers are located. If the compilers do not exist at that PATH entry, make sure you followed the instructions on the MSYS2 website to install Mingw-w64.
Create Hello World
From a Windows command prompt, create an empty folder called projects where you can place all your VS Code projects. Then create a sub-folder called helloworld , navigate into it, and open VS Code in that folder by entering the following commands:
The "code ." command opens VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your "workspace". Accept the Workspace Trust dialog by selecting Yes, I trust the authors since this is a folder you created.
As you go through the tutorial, you will see three files created in a .vscode folder in the workspace:
- tasks.json (build instructions)
- launch.json (debugger settings)
- c_cpp_properties.json (compiler path and IntelliSense settings)
Add a source code file
In the File Explorer title bar, select the New File button and name the file helloworld.cpp .
Add hello world source code
Now paste in this source code:
Now press ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+S ) to save the file. Notice how the file you just added appears in the File Explorer view ( ⇧⌘E (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+E ) ) in the side bar of VS Code:
You can also enable Auto Save to automatically save your file changes, by checking Auto Save in the main File menu.
The Activity Bar on the far left lets you open different views such as Search, Source Control, and Run. You'll look at the Run view later in this tutorial. You can find out more about the other views in the VS Code User Interface documentation.
Note: When you save or open a C++ file, you may see a notification from the C/C++ extension about the availability of an Insiders version, which lets you test new features and fixes. You can ignore this notification by selecting the X (Clear Notification).
Explore IntelliSense
In your new helloworld.cpp file, hover over vector or string to see type information. After the declaration of the msg variable, start typing msg. as you would when calling a member function. You should immediately see a completion list that shows all the member functions, and a window that shows the type information for the msg object:
You can press the Tab key to insert the selected member; then, when you add the opening parenthesis, you will see information about any arguments that the function requires.
Build helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a tasks.json file to tell VS Code how to build (compile) the program. This task will invoke the g++ compiler to create an executable file based on the source code.
From the main menu, choose Terminal > Configure Default Build Task. In the dropdown, which will display a tasks dropdown listing various predefined build tasks for C++ compilers. Choose g++.exe build active file, which will build the file that is currently displayed (active) in the editor.
This will create a tasks.json file in a .vscode folder and open it in the editor.
Your new tasks.json file should look similar to the JSON below:
The command setting specifies the program to run; in this case that is g++. The args array specifies the command-line arguments that will be passed to g++. These arguments must be specified in the order expected by the compiler. This task tells g++ to take the active file ( $ ), compile it, and create an executable file in the current directory ( $ ) with the same name as the active file but with the .exe extension ( $.exe ), resulting in helloworld.exe for our example.
Note: You can learn more about tasks.json variables in the variables reference.
The label value is what you will see in the tasks list; you can name this whatever you like.
The "isDefault": true value in the group object specifies that this task will be run when you press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) . This property is for convenience only; if you set it to false, you can still run it from the Terminal menu with Tasks: Run Build Task.
Running the build
Go back to helloworld.cpp . Your task builds the active file and you want to build helloworld.cpp .
To run the build task defined in tasks.json , press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) or from the Terminal main menu choose Run Build Task.
When the task starts, you should see the Integrated Terminal panel appear below the source code editor. After the task completes, the terminal shows output from the compiler that indicates whether the build succeeded or failed. For a successful g++ build, the output looks something like this:
Create a new terminal using the + button and you'll have a new terminal with the helloworld folder as the working directory. Run dir and you should now see the executable helloworld.exe .
You can run helloworld in the terminal by typing helloworld.exe (or .\helloworld.exe if you use a PowerShell terminal).
Note: You might need to press Enter a couple of times initially to see the PowerShell prompt in the terminal. This issue should be fixed in a future release of Windows.
Modifying tasks.json
You can modify your tasks.json to build multiple C++ files by using an argument like "$\\*.cpp" instead of $ . This will build all .cpp files in your current folder. You can also modify the output filename by replacing "$\\$.exe" with a hard-coded filename (for example "$\\myProgram.exe" ).
Debug helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a launch.json file to configure VS Code to launch the GDB debugger when you press F5 to debug the program.
- From the main menu, choose Run >Add Configuration. . VS Code creates an empty launch.json file.
- Copy and paste the following configuration into launch.json :
The program setting specifies the program you want to debug. Here it is set to the active file folder $ and active filename with the .exe extension $.exe , which if helloworld.cpp is the active file will be helloworld.exe .
By default, the C++ extension won't add any breakpoints to your source code and the stopAtEntry value is set to false .
Change the stopAtEntry value to true to cause the debugger to stop on the main method when you start debugging.
Note: The preLaunchTask setting is used to specify task to be executed before launch. Make sure it is consistent with the tasks.json file label setting.
Start a debugging session
- Go back to helloworld.cpp so that it is the active file.
- Press F5 or from the main menu choose Run > Start Debugging. Before you start stepping through the source code, let's take a moment to notice several changes in the user interface:
The Integrated Terminal appears at the bottom of the source code editor. In the Debug Output tab, you see output that indicates the debugger is up and running.
The editor highlights the first statement in the main method. This is a breakpoint that the C++ extension automatically sets for you:
The Run view on the left shows debugging information. You'll see an example later in the tutorial.
At the top of the code editor, a debugging control panel appears. You can move this around the screen by grabbing the dots on the left side.
Step through the code
Now you're ready to start stepping through the code.
Click or press the Step over icon in the debugging control panel.
This will advance program execution to the first line of the for loop, and skip over all the internal function calls within the vector and string classes that are invoked when the msg variable is created and initialized. Notice the change in the Variables window on the left.
In this case, the errors are expected because, although the variable names for the loop are now visible to the debugger, the statement has not executed yet, so there is nothing to read at this point. The contents of msg are visible, however, because that statement has completed.
Press Step over again to advance to the next statement in this program (skipping over all the internal code that is executed to initialize the loop). Now, the Variables window shows information about the loop variables.
Press Step over again to execute the cout statement. (Note that as of the March 2019 release, the C++ extension does not print any output to the Debug Console until the loop exits.)
If you like, you can keep pressing Step over until all the words in the vector have been printed to the console. But if you are curious, try pressing the Step Into button to step through source code in the C++ standard library!
To return to your own code, one way is to keep pressing Step over. Another way is to set a breakpoint in your code by switching to the helloworld.cpp tab in the code editor, putting the insertion point somewhere on the cout statement inside the loop, and pressing F9 . A red dot appears in the gutter on the left to indicate that a breakpoint has been set on this line.
Then press F5 to start execution from the current line in the standard library header. Execution will break on cout . If you like, you can press F9 again to toggle off the breakpoint.
When the loop has completed, you can see the output in the Integrated Terminal, along with some other diagnostic information that is output by GDB.
Set a watch
Sometimes you might want to keep track of the value of a variable as your program executes. You can do this by setting a watch on the variable.
Place the insertion point inside the loop. In the Watch window, click the plus sign and in the text box, type word , which is the name of the loop variable. Now view the Watch window as you step through the loop.
Add another watch by adding this statement before the loop: int i = 0; . Then, inside the loop, add this statement: ++i; . Now add a watch for i as you did in the previous step.
To quickly view the value of any variable while execution is paused on a breakpoint, you can hover over it with the mouse pointer.
C/C++ configurations
If you want more control over the C/C++ extension, you can create a c_cpp_properties.json file, which will allow you to change settings such as the path to the compiler, include paths, C++ standard (default is C++17), and more.
You can view the C/C++ configuration UI by running the command C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI) from the Command Palette ( ⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P ) ).
This opens the C/C++ Configurations page. When you make changes here, VS Code writes them to a file called c_cpp_properties.json in the .vscode folder.
Here, we've changed the Configuration name to GCC, set the Compiler path dropdown to the g++ compiler, and the IntelliSense mode to match the compiler (gcc-x64)
Visual Studio Code places these settings in .vscode\c_cpp_properties.json . If you open that file directly, it should look something like this:
You only need to add to the Include path array setting if your program includes header files that are not in your workspace or in the standard library path.
Compiler path
The extension uses the compilerPath setting to infer the path to the C++ standard library header files. When the extension knows where to find those files, it can provide features like smart completions and Go to Definition navigation.
The C/C++ extension attempts to populate compilerPath with the default compiler location based on what it finds on your system. The extension looks in several common compiler locations.
The compilerPath search order is:
- First check for the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler
- Then look for g++ on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Then g++ for Mingw-w64.
If you have Visual Studio or WSL installed, you may need to change compilerPath to match the preferred compiler for your project. For example, if you installed Mingw-w64 version 8.1.0 using the i686 architecture, Win32 threading, and sjlj exception handling install options, the path would look like this: C:\Program Files (x86)\mingw-w64\i686-8.1.0-win32-sjlj-rt_v6-rev0\mingw64\bin\g++.exe .
Troubleshooting
MSYS2 is installed, but g++ and gdb are still not found
You must follow the steps on the MSYS2 website and use the MSYS CLI to install Mingw-w64, which contains those tools.
MinGW 32-bit
If you need a 32-bit version of the MinGW toolset, consult the Downloading section on the MSYS2 wiki. It includes links to both 32-bit and 64-bit installation options.
In this tutorial, you will configure Visual Studio Code to use the GCC C++ compiler (g++) and GDB debugger on Linux. GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection; GDB is the GNU debugger.
After configuring VS Code, you will compile and debug a simple C++ program in VS Code. This tutorial does not teach you GCC, GDB, Ubuntu or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.
If you have trouble, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.
Prerequisites
To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following:
Install the C++ extension for VS Code. You can install the C/C++ extension by searching for 'c++' in the Extensions view ( ⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X ) ).
Ensure GCC is installed
Although you'll use VS Code to edit your source code, you'll compile the source code on Linux using the g++ compiler. You'll also use GDB to debug. These tools are not installed by default on Ubuntu, so you have to install them. Fortunately, that's easy.
First, check to see whether GCC is already installed. To verify whether it is, open a Terminal window and enter the following command:
If GCC isn't installed, run the following command from the terminal window to update the Ubuntu package lists. An out-of-date Linux distribution can sometimes interfere with attempts to install new packages.
Next install the GNU compiler tools and the GDB debugger with this command:
Create Hello World
From the terminal window, create an empty folder called projects to store your VS Code projects. Then create a subfolder called helloworld , navigate into it, and open VS Code in that folder by entering the following commands:
The code . command opens VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your "workspace". As you go through the tutorial, you will create three files in a .vscode folder in the workspace:
- tasks.json (compiler build settings)
- launch.json (debugger settings)
- c_cpp_properties.json (compiler path and IntelliSense settings)
Add hello world source code file
In the File Explorer title bar, select New File and name the file helloworld.cpp .
Paste in the following source code:
Now press ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+S ) to save the file. Notice that your files are listed in the File Explorer view ( ⇧⌘E (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+E ) ) in the side bar of VS Code:
You can also enable Auto Save to automatically save your file changes, by checking Auto Save in the main File menu.
The Activity Bar on the edge of Visual Studio Code lets you open different views such as Search, Source Control, and Run. You'll look at the Run view later in this tutorial. You can find out more about the other views in the VS Code User Interface documentation.
Note: When you save or open a C++ file, you may see a notification from the C/C++ extension about the availability of an Insiders version, which lets you test new features and fixes. You can ignore this notification by selecting the X (Clear Notification).
Explore IntelliSense
In the helloworld.cpp file, hover over vector or string to see type information. After the declaration of the msg variable, start typing msg. as you would when calling a member function. You should immediately see a completion list that shows all the member functions, and a window that shows the type information for the msg object:
You can press the Tab key to insert the selected member. Then, when you add the opening parenthesis, you'll see information about arguments that the function requires.
Build helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a tasks.json file to tell VS Code how to build (compile) the program. This task will invoke the g++ compiler to create an executable file from the source code.
It's important to have helloworld.cpp open in the editor because the next step uses the active file in the editor for context to create the build task in the next step.
From the main menu, choose Terminal > Configure Default Build Task. A dropdown appears showing various predefined build tasks for C++ compilers. Choose C/C++: g++ build active file.
This will create a tasks.json file in a .vscode folder and open it in the editor.
Your new tasks.json file should look similar to the JSON below:
Note: You can learn more about tasks.json variables in the variables reference.
The command setting specifies the program to run; in this case that is g++. The args array specifies the command-line arguments that will be passed to g++. These arguments must be specified in the order expected by the compiler.
This task tells g++ to take the active file ( $ ), compile it, and create an executable file in the current directory ( $ ) with the same name as the active file but without an extension ( $ ), resulting in helloworld for our example.
The label value is what you will see in the tasks list; you can name this whatever you like.
The "isDefault": true value in the group object specifies that this task will be run when you press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) . This property is for convenience only; if you set it to false, you can still run it from the Terminal menu with Tasks: Run Build Task.
Running the build
Go back to helloworld.cpp . Your task builds the active file and you want to build helloworld.cpp .
To run the build task defined in tasks.json , press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B ) or from the Terminal main menu choose Run Build Task.
When the task starts, you should see the Integrated Terminal panel appear below the source code editor. After the task completes, the terminal shows output from the compiler that indicates whether the build succeeded or failed. For a successful g++ build, the output looks something like this:
Create a new terminal using the + button and you'll have a terminal running your default shell with the helloworld folder as the working directory. Run ls and you should now see the executable helloworld (no file extension).
You can run helloworld in the terminal by typing ./helloworld .
Modifying tasks.json
You can modify your tasks.json to build multiple C++ files by using an argument like "$/*.cpp" instead of $ . You can also modify the output filename by replacing "$/$" with a hard-coded filename (for example 'helloworld.out').
Debug helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a launch.json file to configure VS Code to launch the GDB debugger when you press F5 to debug the program.
From the main menu, choose Run > Add Configuration. . VS Code creates an empty launch.json file. Copy and paste the following configuration into launch.json :
In the JSON above, program specifies the program you want to debug. Here it is set to the active file folder $ and active filename without an extension $ , which if helloworld.cpp is the active file will be helloworld .
By default, the C++ extension won't add any breakpoints to your source code and the stopAtEntry value is set to false .
Change the stopAtEntry value to true to cause the debugger to stop on the main method when you start debugging.
Start a debugging session
- Go back to helloworld.cpp so that it is the active file.
- Press F5 or from the main menu choose Run > Start Debugging. Before you start stepping through the code, let's take a moment to notice several changes in the user interface:
The Integrated Terminal appears at the bottom of the source code editor. In the Debug Output tab, you see output that indicates the debugger is up and running.
The editor highlights the first statement in the main method. This is a breakpoint that the C++ extension automatically sets for you:
The Run view on the left shows debugging information. You'll see an example later in the tutorial.
At the top of the code editor, a debugging control panel appears. You can move this around the screen by grabbing the dots on the left side.
Step through the code
Now you're ready to start stepping through the code.
Click or press the Step over icon in the debugging control panel.
This will advance program execution to the first line of the for loop, and skip over all the internal function calls within the vector and string classes that are invoked when the msg variable is created and initialized. Notice the change in the Variables window on the side.
Press Step over again to advance to the next statement in this program (skipping over all the internal code that is executed to initialize the loop). Now, the Variables window shows information about the loop variables.
Press Step over again to execute the cout statement. (Note that as of the March 2019 release, the C++ extension does not print any output to the Debug Console until the last cout executes.)
If you like, you can keep pressing Step over until all the words in the vector have been printed to the console. But if you are curious, try pressing the Step Into button to step through source code in the C++ standard library!
To return to your own code, one way is to keep pressing Step over. Another way is to set a breakpoint in your code by switching to the helloworld.cpp tab in the code editor, putting the insertion point somewhere on the cout statement inside the loop, and pressing F9 . A red dot appears in the gutter on the left to indicate that a breakpoint has been set on this line.
Then press F5 to start execution from the current line in the standard library header. Execution will break on cout . If you like, you can press F9 again to toggle off the breakpoint.
When the loop has completed, you can see the output in the Debug Console tab of the integrated terminal, along with some other diagnostic information that is output by GDB.
Set a watch
To keep track of the value of a variable as your program executes, set a watch on the variable.
Place the insertion point inside the loop. In the Watch window, click the plus sign and in the text box, type word , which is the name of the loop variable. Now view the Watch window as you step through the loop.
To quickly view the value of any variable while execution is paused on a breakpoint, you can hover over it with the mouse pointer.
C/C++ configurations
If you want more control over the C/C++ extension, you can create a c_cpp_properties.json file, which will allow you to change settings such as the path to the compiler, include paths, C++ standard (default is C++17), and more.
You can view the C/C++ configuration UI by running the command C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI) from the Command Palette ( ⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P ) ).
This opens the C/C++ Configurations page. When you make changes here, VS Code writes them to a file called c_cpp_properties.json in the .vscode folder.
You only need to modify the Include path setting if your program includes header files that are not in your workspace or in the standard library path.
Visual Studio Code places these settings in .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json . If you open that file directly, it should look something like this:
Reusing your C++ configuration
VS Code is now configured to use gcc on Linux. The configuration applies to the current workspace. To reuse the configuration, just copy the JSON files to a .vscode folder in a new project folder (workspace) and change the names of the source file(s) and executable as needed.
Troubleshooting
Compiler and linking errors
The most common cause of errors (such as undefined _main , or attempting to link with file built for unknown-unsupported file format , and so on) occurs when helloworld.cpp is not the active file when you start a build or start debugging. This is because the compiler is trying to compile something that isn't source code, like your launch.json , tasks.json , or c_cpp_properties.json file.
I am creating a very large project (a few thousand lines) and so would rather not use Notepad++. An IDE would make it so much easier. I have experience with Microsoft Visual Studio and love it. Is there some easy way to use Cygwin's GCC from within Microsoft Visual Studio?
Alternately, are there any other good Windows IDEs for GCC besides NetBeans and Eclipse? (I hate both of them with a passion.)
Hardly think so. GCC also exists for Windows as far as I am concerned. Apart from that, why would you use GCC? Do you need to do something Windows-specific? If so, Visual Studio would clearly be an advantage.
The FTP client is going to be unix based, not windows based. I probably should have mentioned that in my question.
You can try Qt Creator. All members of my team dropped their eclipse installations after they saw it on my workstation. It can work with CMake (which supports gcc out of the box), Makefiles and their own QMake system (I would not recommend this one).
3 Answers 3
Option 1: Create a Custom Build Tool
Visual Studio 2005 and newer will let you register custom build tools. They tell the IDE how to transform files of one form (e.g. a .cpp file) into another form (e.g. an .obj file).
So far as I know, no one has done this yet for GCC. And, doing it yourself requires writing COM code, which is probably too deep a pool to dive into just for a single project. You'd have to have a compelling reason to take this project on.
You then have to manually adjust each project to tell it to use the custom build tool instead of the default, since you're using a file name extension ( .cpp , probably) that Visual C++ already knows about. You'll run into trouble if you try to mix the VC++ and g++ compilers for a single executable built from multiple modules.
On the plus side, if you were looking to start an open source project, this sounds like a good one to me. I expect you'd quickly gather a big user base.
Option 2: Makefile Project
Start Visual Studio and say File > New Project.
In the Visual C++ section, select Makefile Project
Fill out the Makefile Project Wizard:
- Build command line: make
- Clean commands: make clean
- Rebuild command line: make clean all
You can leave the Output (for debugging) field alone if you've named your executable after the project name and it lands where Visual Studio expects to find it.
Leave the rest of the fields alone unless you know what they are and why you want to change them. As an example, you might choose to pass a -D flag on the Preprocessor definitions line to get separate debug and release outputs. If you know you want this, you know how to set it up, so I'm not going to make this long answer even longer in order to explain it.
You'll be asked the same set of questions for the Release build. If you want to bother with separate debug and release builds, you'd make any changes here.
Having done all this, you still have to create the Makefile , and add a make.exe to your PATH . As with the debug vs. release question, going into that level of detail would push this answer off topic.
As ugly as this looks, it's still easier than creating custom build tools. Plus, you say you need to port to Unix eventually, so you're going to need that Makefile anyway.
Option 3: Cross-Platform Development
You say you want to port this program to Unix at some point, but that doesn't mean you must use GCC on Windows now. It is quite possible to write your program so that it builds under Visual C++ on Windows and GCC/Makefiles on *ix systems.
There are several tools that make this easier. One very popular option is CMake, which is available as an installation time option in newer versions of Visual Studio. There are many alternatives such as SCons and Bakefile.
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