C++0x11 + OSX + Eclipse: Part 0 – The Why

I use Eclipse CDT as my C++ editor of choice on my Mac at work and at Home.
It’s really a very good editor for C++. Xcode, is a decent editor. When doing iphone / mac OSX projects with Objective-C its an amazing editor. However it is very bad at C++, in my opinion Xcode 4 is much worse than Xcode 3 at C++ code editing.

Is it a conspiracy to nudge developers towards developing using (basically) Apple’s own Objective-C programming language? Maybe I’m not sure, however I do love Objective-C, it’s my second and sometimes first favorite programing language, behind only C++.

To be honest it’s probably not, since they support the Clang+LLVM project which supports C++11, in fact it supports more features than GCC4.7 and is a faster compiler.

C++ has matured so much in the last few years, and a large part of that is due to the Boost libraries. In fact Boost, is sort of used as a testing ground for C++ – and many parts of C++0x11 started off as Boost Libraries ( for-each, any containers, lambdas, smart pointers, thread ).

As an OSX affectionato, I have to admit that I was upset that my latest version of OSX ( Lion at the time of writing ) was using GCC 4.2… GCC 4.2.1 is from July 2007!. The compiler and accompanying library is over 5 years old! In computer years, from what I sophisticatedly computed, thats 1 zillion years ago. That doesn’t seem right… Apple is defineintly making amzing strides with LLVM+Clang compiler, it’s actually better and faster than the latest GCC (4.7 at time of writing), however Xcode is such aTERRIBLE C++ editor, often not providing auto-complete, and not being able to find references until upto a minute after click. One minute? That’s crazy.

Hearing all this talk about how great C++0x11 was, I wanted to use it. To be honest, a lot of the stuff can be faked using the amazing Boost libraries – some of which are now standard. However I felt ripped off, these are officially part of C++ I should be able to use them now right!? Well not on OSX you can’t – well at least not without a little bit of work.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll guide you through the steps I went through to get C++11 to work on my OSX 10.6 / 10.7 mac.

As a preview, all of these features I found from the C++11 wikipedia page compiled and work correctly.

/*
 * main.cpp
 *
 *  Created on: Feb 7, 2012
 *      Author: onedayitwillmake
 */

//============================================================================
// Name        : HelloCPP11.cpp
// Author      : Mario Gonzalez
// Version     :
// Copyright   : (c) Mario Gonzalez
// Description : Hello World in C++, Ansi-style
//============================================================================
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

void hello() {
	std::cout << "Hello Concurrent World\n";
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {

	std::vector myvec;

	// Constant iterators
	for (std::vector::const_iterator itr = myvec.cbegin();
			itr != myvec.cend(); ++itr) {
		std::cout << "Hello!" << std::endl;
	}

	// Auto!
	for (auto itr = myvec.cbegin(); itr != myvec.cend(); ++itr) {
		std::cout << "Hello!" << std::endl;
	}

	// the keyword decltype can be used to determine the type of an expression at compile-time.
	// For example:
	int some_int;
	decltype(some_int) other_integer_variable = 5;

	//The type denoted by decltype can be different from the type deduced by auto originally
	const std::vector v(1);
	auto a = v[0]; // a has type int
	decltype(v[0]) b = 1; // b has type const int&, the return type of
						  // std::vector::operator[](size_type) const
	auto c = 0; // c has type int
	auto d = c; // d has type int
	decltype(c) e; // e has type int, the type of the entity named by c
	decltype((c)) f = c; // f has type int&, because (c) is an lvalue
	decltype(0) g; // g has type int, because 0 is an rvalue

	// Range based loop - ( i always thought these were stupid but whatever)
	int my_array[5] = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
	for (int &x : my_array) {
		x *= 2;
	}

	// Initialize standard container easier way, instead of pushback
	std::vector alphabetsoup = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };

	// Lamda
	[](int x, int y) {return x + y;};

	//The following two examples demonstrate usage of a lambda expression:
	std::vector some_list;

	some_list = {0,1,2,3,4,5}; // Instead of for(int i=0;i<5;i++)some_list.push_back(i);

	// FOR EACH! - with LAMDA!
	int total = 0;
	std::for_each(begin(some_list), end(some_list), [&total](int x) {
		total += x;
	});

	// THREADING!
	cout << "starting" << endl;
	thread t(hello);
	t.join();
	cout << "ending" << endl;

}