Other Programming Tools

Boost provides free peer-reviewed portable C++ source libraries. The emphasis is on libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. The libraries are intended to be widely useful, and are in regular use by thousands of programmers across a broad spectrum of applications, platforms and programming environments.

GNU DDD is a graphical front-end for command-line debuggers such as GDB, DBX, WDB, Ladebug, JDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, the Bash debugger, or the Python debugger. Besides “usual” front-end features such as viewing source texts, DDD has an interactive graphical data display, where data structures are displayed as graphs..

cachecc1 is a GCC cache. It can be compared with the well known ccache package. It has some unique features including the use of an LD_PRELOADed shared object to catch invocations to cc1, cc1plus and as, it transparently supports all build methods, it can cache GCC bootstraps and it can be combined with distcc to transparently distribute compilations.

ccache is a compiler cache. It acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in 5 to 10 times faster speeds in common compilations.

distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is usually much faster than a local compile. distcc does not require all machines to share a filesystem, have synchronized clocks, or to have the same libraries or header files installed. They can even have different processors or operating systems, if cross-compilers are installed.

Euphoria is a simple, flexible, and easy-to-learn programming language. It lets you quickly and easily develop programs for Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD. Euphoria was first released in 1993. Since then Rapid Deployment Software has been steadily improving it with the help of a growing number of enthusiastic users. Although Euphoria provides subscript checking, uninitialized variable checking and numerous other run-time checks, it is extremely fast. People have used it to develop high-speed DOS games, Windows GUI programs, and Linux X Windows programs. It is also very useful for CGI (Web-based) programming.

FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e., the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST).

GDB is the GNU Project debugger. It allows you to see what is going on “inside” another program while it executes. It also allows you to see what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

GOB (GOB2 anyway) is a preprocessor for making GObjects with inline C code so that generated files are not edited. Syntax is inspired by Java and Yacc or Lex. The implementation is intentionally kept simple, and no C actual code parsing is done.

ccache is clone of ccache, with the goal of supporting other compilers than GCC and adding additional features. Embedded compilers will especially be in focus.

GTK+/GNOME language bindings allow GTK+ to be used from other programming languages, in the style of those languages.

KDE and most KDE applications are implemented using the C++ programming language, however there are number of bindings to other languages are available. These include scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby, and systems programming languages such as Java and C#.

Numerical Python adds a fast array facility to the Python language.

There are many Perl scripts and additional modules located on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) web site. Here you will find “All Things Perl”.

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool, i.e, a next-generation build tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic make utility with integrated functionality similar to Autoconf/Automake and compiler caches such as ccache.

strace is a system call tracer, i.e., a debugging tool which prints out a trace of all the system calls made by another process or program.

SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. SWIG is used with different types of languages including common scripting languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk and Ruby. The list of supported languages also includes non-scripting languages such as C#, Common Lisp (Allegro CL), Java, Modula-3 and OCAML. Also several interpreted and compiled Scheme implementations (Chicken, Guile, MzScheme) are supported. SWIG is most commonly used to create high-level interpreted or compiled programming environments, user interfaces, and as a tool for testing and prototyping C/C++ software. SWIG can also export its parse tree in the form of XML and Lisp s-expressions.

Valgrind is a collection of five tools: two memory error detectors, a thread error detector, a cache profiler and a heap profiler used for debugging and profiling Linux programs. Features include automatic detection of many memory management and threading bugs as well as detailed profiling to speed up and reduce memory use of your programs.