Create a makefile for c program how to#
Create a makefile for c program generator#
Create a makefile for c program software#

Create a makefile for c program generator#

Notice that large programs (a web browser, an optimizing compiler, an OS kernel) have often many millions lines of source code organized in at least hundreds of translation units, and often have some generated C/C++ code (by some script in awk, python, guile, etc., or a specialized program itself coded in C++, or an external generator like ANTLR or gperf) for application-specific metaprogramming or aspect-oriented programming purposes. As soon as they will grow, you'll need some building process.

So you don't need make (or some other builder) yet, just because your programs are very tiny. GNU make itself! See also sourceforge, github, etc.

Create a makefile for c program software#

You should look into the source code of several free software programs (e.g. In several cases some *.c files or some header *.h included by them are generated by other programs (like SWIG, GNU bison, etc.)

for configuration reasons, the Makefile is generated (e.g. Notice that for historical reasons the tab character is significant for make, so you need a specific mode in your editor. Here is an example of Makefile, and another one. Then, you could build such a program using some other builder (like omake or scons, or ninja etc.), or even using a shell script (BTW, the GNU make distribution contains a shell script to build it on systems without any make yet!).īut yes, I believe you should learn GNU make (and you may even want to take advantage of recent GNU make features, e.g. Both are quite large software (many millions of source lines) The recent version of GCC compiler, and the recent Linux kernel have dozens of human-written C or C++ source files bigger than ten thousand lines. I like having source files of several thousand lines. Some people prefer having many tiny files (of a few dozen lines). of a foo.c or bar.cc file) is a matter of habits and conventional. The size, organization, name, and purpose of a translation unit (i.e. Notice that with C++ the usual included header files are themselves quite big, so having tiny translation units slows the overall build process. more than ten thousand lines of source code), you'll want to organize it in several translation units (at least to avoiding very long build times while working on it, and preferably to group together related code or features). For C++11 code, replace gcc with g++ -std=c++11 in your GNU Makefile, use CC & CFLAGS variables for C and CXX & CXXFLAGS for C++.Īs soon as you are writing some not-tiny program in C or C++ (e.g. add -march=native -O2 to your GCC compiler flags). For production and benchmarking, ask for compiler optimizations (e.g. With a recent GCC 5 compiler (at end of 2015), you may also want to use (occasionally) various -fsanitize= debugging options. GDB and memory leak detectors like valgrind.

Create a makefile for c program how to#

gcc -Wall -Wextra -g for C code compiled by GCC.) and learn how to use your debugger, e.g. See also this answer to a related question.ĭuring the debugging phase, compile with all warnings and debug info (e.g.

It organizes the various compilation steps of the translation units (and avoid running useless compilations again). several *.c or *.cc files which are #include-ing some other header files) which are linked together (it is not very useful for a single source file tiny program). First, a Makefile for make is really useful when you build a program from several translation units (i.e.