C Resources

Tools for C Programming

Build Tools

Tools for Building Your Code

• Make
  • GNU Make
  • PMake (tutorial)
  • A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
• Others
  • CMake
  • Bazel
  • Meson
  • Gradle (instructions for building native software)

Tools for Portability

• GNU Autotools
  • Autoconf
    • Generates a “configure” script which sets up your makefiles and helps your pgoram be portable across many Unix-like and Linux systems.
  • Automake
    • Generates Makefiles which work across many systems (the common feature set of “make” itself is surprisingly limited)
    • The generated makefiles will automatically track dependencies
  • See An Introduction to the Autotools
  • GNU Autotools has a reputation for being hard to use. This is fair, but they are also more powerful than any other approach to the same set of problems.
• GNU libtool
  • Provides a machine-independent way to build libraries, including shared (dynamic link) libraries.
  • The best way to use this is via GNU Autotools.
• Metaconfig is primarily intended for building Perl.
• Try Your Build Tool
  • Some build tools, for example CMake, also attempt to solve portability challenges, though arguably attempts only a narrower scope
• Obsolete
  • GNU Autotools essentially out-competed a number of predecessor systems; if you see these in use today you could well have a lot of trouble getting them to help you build on modern systems
  • imake (and xmkmf) has been obsolete since the early 2000s. See conversion guide

Configuration Management

Software configuration management is a very broad category and encompasses how you build, version-control and audit your software and computer systems. Because of this breadth, it doesn’t make much sense to link to particular tools here. Instead we link to more specific categories.

• Version Control (also known as Revision Control) is probably what most people understand when they hear the phrase “Configuration Management”.
• Build Management is already covered above
• Software Development Lifecycle Tools
  • These vary from lightweight and flexible to comprehensive and burdensome.
  • Nothing about them is C-specific and many C programmers will not need or use these, so we don’t list them here.
• Defect and Work Item Tracking
  • Not really specific to C so try some related subreddits:
    • http://www.reddit.com/r/softwaredevelopment (What issue tracking software does your team use? Are you satisfied?
    • http://www.reddit.com/r/QualityAssurance (tools query)
    • http://www.reddit.com/r/programming
    • http://www.reddit.com/r/Agile (survey)

Working With Source Code

Online Tools

• Matt Godbolt’s Compiler Explorer lets you paste or type code fragments and examine the machine code they compile to.

Pastebins

• If your source code is long, it is much better to cut down your example before posting it (and in any case this will often help you debug it!). But if you really really can’t, you could use a “pastebin” site. Beware though, some of these sites can contain malicious content.

• GitHub Gist
• https://pastebin.com/
• https://textbin.net/
• https://ideone.com/ (will compile some programs)
• https://pastecode.io/
• https://pastesio.com/
• More: https://github.com/lorien/awesome-pastebins

Code Formatters

• clang-tidy
• GNU indent
• Most IDEs can do this automatically, though.

Style Checkers

See the static-analysis page.

Documentation Generators (from source code)

• clang-doc
• Doxygen
• cweb (warning: not suitable for retro-fitting!)

Static (Source Code) Analysis

There are a lot of these; see the static-analysis page.

Refactoring and Program Transformation

• IDEs often have this feature built-in so you may not need a separate tool for this.
• Some static analysis tools also have program transformation featurs.
• Coccinelle

Working With Your Compiled Program

Debugging

• IDEs generally incorporate a debugger.
• Traditional Debuggers
  • GDB: The GNU Project Debugger
    • Tutorial: Beej’s Guide to the GNU Debugger (GDB)
    • If you’re not familiar with GDB, learn how to use “TUI mode”, it is more user-friendly.
    • Debugging remote programs
      • Link the GDB remote debugging stub into your program
      • Run gdbserver on the remote system
• Debugging without Debuggers
  • Logging (i.e. emitting messages about what the program is doing) is an enduringly popular debugging strategy
  • Unit tests: if you have a hypothesis about what the problem is, you can write a unit test that verifies your program’s behaviour. If your unit test uncovers the bug, you can fix the bug and keep the test.
• See also the Dynamic Analysis section

Profiling

Profiling (i.e. determining what your program spends its time doing) is often a feature of the compiler itself, and to “profiling tools” are often more concerned with the analysis of the output of the compiler’s profiling featuire.

• gprof is part of GNU binutils (as is ld, so if you are programming on Linux you likely already have this installed)
• flamegraph is an interactive tool for exploring profiling data

Code Coverage

The most important use of code coverage tools is to figure out what parts of your code are not yet covered by tests. Many coverage tools use the same techniques as profilers, and often a single tool can do both jobs.

• gcov
  • gcov is included with GCC
  • clang has a different, compatible, tool with the same name

Dynamic Analysis

These are tools which deduce problems with your program at runtime.

• Memory Access debugging
  • Valgrind
    • See also their poll on comparison with Purify and Insure++ from a (years ago) Valgrind survey
  • DUMA
  • See also Sanitizers
  • See also Wikipedia list of memory debuggers
• Sanitizers
  • ASAN, MSAN etc. are now part of LLVM and GCC, so the original Google project has been archived.

Inspection Tools (Not Requiring Source Code)

These are tools which inspect the operation of a program without necessarily requiring source code for it.

• Program Tracing
  • General-prupose
    • dtrace led the way and primarily targets FreeBSD and the Solaris family of operating systems.
    • bpftrace
    • lttng
    • perf
  • System-call tracing
    • strace
    • truss
  • Library-function call tracing
    • ltrace
• Synthetic Execution
  • Valgrind suite; the analyzers described below are all included.
    • Memcheck is Valgrind’s default checker; it tells you if your program’s execution depends on uninitialised values or your pogram accesses memory it should not.
    • Cachegrind analyses how your program interacts with a CPUs cache and branch predictor
    • Callgrind collects call-graph (which functions call which other functions) data; you can visualize the result with Kcachegrind.
    • Threading issues
      • Helgrind
      • DRD
    • Heap profiling
      • Massif is a heap profiler (analyzes your program’s use of heap and, optionally, stack)
      • DHAT

Inspecting Things Other Than Programs

Sometimes you want to inspect the general state of your system or its actions to figure out what is happening, as opposed to just inspecting the actions of your program.

• Linux / Unix
  • Brendan Gregg gave a good overview at LISA 2014
  • These tools all have manual pages, so many of them don’t need links.
  • Network
    • tcpdump works on many Unix-like systems, sometimes with slight differences in filter syntax.
      • Tutorial
      • Cheat Sheet
    • wireshark provides an excellent way to analyse packet dumps (generated by, for example, tcpdump)
    • netstat, ss, nstat
  • CPU
    • top, htop, atop
    • ps
  • File System
    • iostat
    • lsof
• Windows
  • I’m sure these exist, but I am not familiar with anything that post-dates SoftICE.
• Embedded
  • Embedded systems with a Linix kernel can take advantage of the tools listed above.
  • Bare-Metal
    • Logic Analyzers
    • Oscilloscopes
    • In-Circuit (CPU) Emulators
    • Bare-Metal debugging
      • Segger J-Link probes
    • Multi-Function Analyzers
      • Digilent Analog Discovery
    • Protocol Analyzers
      • TCP/IP: You can do TCP/IP analysis on a separate computer/device, for example tcpdump on a nearby Linux box. You may need an Ethernet switch on which you can configure port mirroring.
      • USB: TotalPhase Beagle
      • Multi-Purpose: HHD Device Monitor Studio

This site is open source. Improve this page.