Writing code in C++ is great fun, but that fun can come to a dead halt if you realize you have no good way to compile it. So, what does one do? Well, my first attempt was to connect to a Sun Solaris system to ask it to compile for me, but for some reason CC was being a bitch and wouldn’t read my file and additionally I kept trying to call “cc” instead (cc is for C, not C++). Once getting frustrated in Solaris, I moved to trying to manually call the Visual Studio .NET VC7 compiler… apparently it doesn’t work on the systems in the labs. Next, I tried “calling home” to my Suse Linux machine via SSH, that kinda worked, it compiled and stuff, but I still couldn’t edit the file on a machine that also had access to the file to compile it, so that was a bust. Finally I gave up on the whole “remote compile” thing and went to a Solaris lab, sat down, compiled and was happy.
Since I compiled my little program I have been playing with the compilers a little more and I can now compile in the labs on Solaris, remotely on Linux and I even managed to get a command line compiler set up on my Windows Server 2003 system.
cc – Unix/Linux C compiler
CC – Unix/Linux C++ Compiler
gcc – not sure, but it doesn’t work for me.
g++ – GNU C++ compiler, works on several OSes