Obtaining CC Development Tools

Obtaining C/C++ Development Tools

The three main tools that you need to develop C or C++ software under UNIX are gcc, make, and gdb. gcc is a collection of compilers, make is a tool for handling dependencies in large projects, and gdb is a debugger. All three are open source and are distributed from the Free Software Foundation under the GNU public license. The GNU tools are widely used and have an active community constantly improving and fixing them.

You can download and install gcc, gdb, and make from http://www.gnu.org/ or http://prep.ai.mit.edu/. Most Linux distributions come with these tools as part of their standard installation. On other UNIX systems, you might have to download and install them yourself.

While this chapter focuses on the three GNU tools, there are many other development tools available for UNIX, such as the compiler cc. You could, for example, substitute cc for gcc, as much of the command-line syntax is the same.