Compiling

When we write C++ code, there are a few concepts we need to understand:

  • source code : this is the C++ instructions we directly write. We will use our text editor and create a file with the extension .cpp, like hello.cpp.

    This is readable to us, but it does not contain the instructions that the processor can interpret directly.

  • compiler : a compiler is a program that takes the source code file (e.g. hello.cpp) and translates it into machine code instructions specific to the processor in our computer. We will use the compiler g++.

  • executable : this is the name of the program output by the compiler that is able to be run by the operating system.

    Traditionally it will not have an extension on Unix (so hello.cpp will produce an executable named hello), while on Windows, you will often see the extension .exe.

Online Compilers

We can compile this using an online compiler. Let’s try https://godbolt.org/

This will show us the assembly instructions it generated for our code and by checking “Execute the code” in the “Output” dropdown, it will run the code for us.

Compiling on the Command Line

Now let’s see how to invoke g++ on the command line.

With your editor, create a file hello.cpp with the above source code in it.

Then we build our executable (compiling and linking all in a single command) via:

g++ -o hello hello.cpp

This turns our source code, hello.cpp into the executable hello.

The option -o is used to name the executable. If we do not provide a name, then the name a.out will be used.

We can then run our program as:

./hello

Tip

If you are using your own computer, then you will need to ensure that the compiler is using a recent C++ standard to build the code we will discuss in this class.

You can add the option -std=c++17 to the compilation line to ensure it uses C++ 17.