21st Century C

Chapter 1. Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation

Look out honey ’cause I’m using technology.

—Iggy Pop, “Search and Destroy”

The C standard library is just not enough to get serious work done.

Instead, the C ecosystem has expanded outside of the standard, which means that knowing how to easily call functions from common but not-ISO-standard libraries is essential if you want to get past doing textbook exercises. Unfortunately, this is the point where most textbooks taper off and leave you to work it out for yourself, which is why you can find C detractors who will say self-dissonant things like C is 40 years old, so you have to write every procedure from scratch in it—they never worked out how to link to a library.

Here is the agenda for the chapter:

• Setting up the requisite tools. This is much easier than it was in the dark days when you had to hunt for every component. You can set up a full build system with all the frills in maybe 10 or 15 minutes (plus all the download time to load so much good stuff).

• How to compile a C program. Yes, you know how to do this, but we need a setup that has hooks for the libraries and their locations; just typing cc myfile.c doesn’t cut it anymore. Make is just about the simplest system to facilitate compiling programs, so it provides a good model for discussion. I’ll show you the smallest possible makefile that offers enough room to grow.

• Whatever system we use will be based on a small set of environment-like variables, so I’ll discuss what they do and ...