To write a professional C++ application, you not only need a basic text editor and a compiler. You require some more tooling. In this blog post, you’ll see a broad list of tools that make C++ programming possible: compilers, IDEs, debuggers and other. Last Update: 14th October 2019. Note: This is a blog post based on the White Paper created by Embarcadero, see the full paper here: C++ Ecosystem White Paper.

A few weeks ago I gave another talk at my local C++ user group. We discussed recent “goodies” from C++ and tools that can increase productivity. Intro In my post for the “C++ summary at the end of 2017” I mentioned that we could see a considerable improvement in the area of tooling for the language.

Do you write code 100% of your job time? I’m guessing the answer is no. Ignoring the whole management part, meetings, coffee, youtube, cats, etc, even if you’re sitting at your keyboard you’re not typing all the time. So what else are you doing? The short answer: you’re probably figuring out what to write and where to add new features (and what to fix)… so you’re mostly reading and trying to understand the code.

Real life: Fixed 1 out of 99 bugs in a project. 117 to go… Have you experienced something similar? Although it’s impossible to write bug-free code, there are tools and practices to lower the rate of mistakes. Today, I’d like to run through a gigantic list of freely available resources from the PVS-Studio Team who works with bugs analysis on a daily basis.

How does your typical coding session in Visual Studio look like? What’s the first thing you do when you’re about to start coding? Yes… let’s check Gmail, Youtube, Reddit, etc… :) OK, please be more professional! So, let’s assume my Visual Studio (2013, 2015 or 2017) is already started. What to do next?

Around one and a half year ago I did some benchmarks on updating objects allocated in a continuous memory block vs allocated individually as pointers on the heap: Vector of Objects vs Vector of Pointers. The benchmarks was solely done from scratch and they’ve used only Windows High Performance Timer for measurement.

After I finished my last post about a performance timer, I got a comment suggesting other libraries - much more powerful than my simple solution. Let’s see what can be found in the area of benchmarking libraries. Intro The timer I’ve introduced recently is easy to use, but also returns just the basic information: elapsed time for an execution of some code… what if we need more advanced data and more structured approach of doing benchmarks in the system?

When you’re doing a code profiling session it’s great to have advanced and easy to use tools. But what if we want to do some simple test/benchmark? Maybe a custom code would do the job? Let’s have a look at simple performance timer for C++ apps. Intro A task might sound simple: detect what part of the code in the ABC module takes most of the time to execute.

Since the beginning of January I’ve had a chance to play with a nice tool called Deleaker. Its main role, as can be easily decoded, is to find leaks in your native applications. I often had problems creating and maintaining custom code that tracks leaks, so Deleaker seems to be a huge relief in those situations.