Debugging and profiling your C/C++ programs using Free Software

May 19, 2009, 03:02 (0 Talkback[s])

[ Thanks to Xenofon Papadopoulos for this link. ]

"-Wall

"Enable most warnings. According to GCC's man page,

"This enables all the warnings about constructions that some users consider questionable, and that are easy to avoid (or modify to prevent the warning), even in conjunction with macros."

"Note that as of version 4.3.3, two of the most powerful features enabled by -Wall, warnings about uninitialized variables use and out of bounds array checking will only work if you specify an optimization level (-O1 for uninitialized variables, -O2 for array bounds checking). This is planned to change in future GCC versions. It is generally suggested that all your programs are compiled with the -Wall option enabled. My suggestion is to also compile your program with -O2 to let GCC test for uninitialized variables and out of bounds array use; turn it off afterwards if you wish to have full access to debuging info.

-Wshadow

"Warn about shadow variables. Shadow variables (i.e. variables declared inside an inner block with the same name as a variable already existing in the scope) are valid in C/C++, but they are quite error prone. You should avoid using them; this compiler option will help you track unintended use."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Speak UNIX fluently with the best tools available(May 16, 2009)
• Open Source rocks! Learning from code by debugging(May 14, 2009)
• Autoconf and Automake Tutorial(May 07, 2009)
• Hey, Don't Dump. Debug!(May 02, 2009)
• /dev/null And /dev/zero On Linux And Unix: What's The Difference?(Apr 30, 2009)
• Where's Your Coding Happy Place?(Apr 22, 2009)
• Code Project: Create a web server in Ruby(Mar 24, 2009)
• Debugging code with strace(Jan 09, 2009)