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by 10000truths 1669 days ago
So much of the C/C++ ecosystem revolves around knowing your build tools that, for most intents and purposes, it should honestly be considered an integral part of the languages. If I ever teach an introductory C/C++ course, I would dedicate at least 1/4 of my time to explaining:

* What a translation unit is, and how compiling a translation unit to an object file works

* What a linker is, and how the linker combines object files into a library/executable

* What make/autotools/cmake are, and how they work

* What FHS is, and how it standardizes the lib/bin/include paths that C/C++ build tools read from/install to

And so on. Any C/C++ course that goes beyond a “Hello world” program without explaining these concepts in detail does its students a disservice.

1 comments

Yeah, in our class we had to figure out this mostly on our own, so after it I'm still at the level where I barely manage to make make work, I'll have to look into those other ones, thanks !