Running Source Code on your own machine

Teach yourself how to interact with and run source code examples of this course.

We'll cover the following

All source code examples are complete; that means, assuming you have a conforming compiler, you can compile and run them. The name of the source file is in the title of the listing. Only, if necessary, will I use the using namespace std directive in the source files.

Run the Programs

Compiling and running the examples is quite easy for the C++11 and C++14 examples in this course. Every modern C++ compiler should support them. For both the GCC and the clang compiler, the C++ standard must be specified as well as the threading library to link against. For example, the g++ compiler from GCC creates an executable program called thread with the following command-line: g++ -std=c++14 -pthread thread.cpp -o thread.

  • -std=c++14: use the language standard C++14
  • -pthread: add support for multithreading with the pthread library
  • thread.cpp: source file
  • -o thread: executable program

The same command-line works for the clang++ compiler. The Microsoft Visual Studio 17 C++ compiler supports C++14 as well. If you have no modern C++ compiler at your disposal, there are a lot of online compilers available. Arne Mertz’ blog post C++ Online Compiler gives a great overview.

With C++17 and C++20, the story becomes quite complicated. I installed the HPX (High-Performance ParalleX) framework, which is a general purpose C++ runtime system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale. HPX has already implemented the Parallel STL of C++17 and many of the concurrency features of C++20. Please refer to the corresponding sections in the chapter The Future: C++20, and read about how you can see the code examples in action.

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