Friday, September 19, 2008

Programming in C

I have a customer who wants me to do some programming in 'c'. It is like back to my childhood again and I am thoroughly enjoying. The job involves sockets data transfers and the best samples I can find are unfortunately on hacker sites. Their code is pretty ordinary and you get the sense that they are particularly young. Their coding style is pretty average but I suppose that if they were good coders they would have real jobs.
I didn't have a c compiler or IDE so I started with LLC. I liked it and it had a lot of nice features but the editor drove me crazy. I next downloaded NetBeans. I think that it is supposed to be a Java IDE but has a C/C++ version. However, you also need a C compiler to go with it.

It supports a number of compilers but I chose MinGW. To get it all working well you need to do things in this order:

Download and install MinGW and put the bin folder in your path statement. Download and install the latest debugger (gdb). To make the MAKE work you need to download and installed MSYS. It will have a little command file that will normalise it with MinGW.
Finally you can download NetBeans. I feel a little like going onto the dark-side given what the CEO of Sun has said about Microsoft over the years.
You can finally download

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