Up: general computing

Programming Aids

For a software development project of any size, you will typically need some tools to keep the process organized. The Geometry Center provides all pieces of the standard unix development environment.

Debuggers

gdb -- gdb is the Gnu debugger. It works particularly well from within emacs, which has a gdb mode. Consult emacs help (or info from the command line) for details on using gdb from within emacs.
dbx -- Another standard debugger is dbx. Unfortunately, the SunView GUI dbxtool is a thing of the past; your are probably better off using gdb from within emacs, unless you know dbx particularly well.
perldb -- Yes, PERL also has a symbolic debugger. Would you expect anything less? For more info, consult the man page.

Make Utilities

Make -- The standard unix make utility.
IMake -- Imake is the dramatically beefed up make utility designed mainly with X11 development in mind. At the Center, it gets things right most of the time, even in our complicated, multiple architecture environment. To learn about Imake, you can try the man page, but you would probably be better off just buying the O'Reilly book, if you are attempting anything difficult.
gmake -- gmake is the Gnu projects make utility. Gmake lies somewhere in between make and imake in power. In addition to the standard make capabilities, it implements a number of useful extensions. Of course, if you use it, its up to you to worry about distributing your software.

Other utilities

RCS -- RCS is the unix revision control system. One sets up an RCS archive that people check files out of to work on. This prevents a group of people working on the same project from both altering a file simultaneously. You may want to check out cvs as well, which is a glossier front end for RCS.
lint -- Lint is a C syntax checker that gives slightly more informative error messages than the compiler. It also will catch various data typing errors, and point out things like assignments in for loops.
pixie -- pixie is an SGI C code profiler that helps you optimize your code. Pixie adds diagnostic code that tabulates execution frequencies for code blocks. The prof command can then be used to interpret the pixie output.
MallocDebug.app -- MallocDebug is part of the NeXT Developer environment, and lives in /NextCeveloper/Apps. If you are running a plain C program, or an X program ( via co-Xist) MallocDebug can "attach" itself to your process, and allow you to set and query abstract markers which help you track down memory allocation. This is a very slick program, but you have to compile for the NeXT. Check the program's Info menu for compilation details.
mallocdebug -- The lowercase version, mallocdebug, is a library available for any architecture that replaces the standard routines, with routines that have more diagnostic capabilities. You can just re-link, which facilitates using a debugger like gdb to track down memory leaks, or you can recompile, which turns on a number of potent runtime debugging features. To recompile, you will have to get at the header files, which live in /u/src/new/misc/mallocdebug.

Up: general computing

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Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996