IDE & Debugging

The recommended IDE for ViewTouch development is Eclipse. The recommended debugger for ViewTouch is GDB - the GNU Debugger. Eclipse provides for a straightforward integration of GDB into Eclipse. I (Gene) am not a developer except to the extent that I can use ViewTouch to build and refine the ViewTouch GUI and restaurant menus so I have to rely, in this case, on the following comments which Nicholas Turnbull has previously written to me.

"I've found that of all the possible IDEs for reviewing and debugging ViewTouch, Eclipse C++ Development Toolkit turns out to be ideal. I'd been laboriously recompiling it via the command line and eventually it just got too much of a drag. By adding the -g flag to the cmake build file, setting Eclipse's build command to "make install" from the /build directory and pointing the Run command to /usr/viewtouch/bin, it's possible to actually both debug and install a live system interactively with everything in the proper directories. The graphical interface to gdb in Eclipse allows the precise object fields to be inspected and the events traced, which is a huge help."

So, thanks Nick, for that. Now, my own comments again. I would like to think that with HiDef displays going for as little as $50-$60 everyone who is going to view/learn ViewTouch code can quite effortlessly set up two HiDef displays so one display is running the ViewTouch GUI and a second display is running Eclipse and GDB, providing a view of the code execution simultaneously with the GUI. I realize that some will say, well duh, to this, but I also realize that others are simply not doing this, so I have to ask anyone not doing this why on earth they would not be doing this. If it's a question of how to do it then let's open an issue and provide a howto for such a setup, OK?

Sergii just reminded me to mention that everyone should also, obviously, be making use of Valgrind. I would mention cppcheck, too.