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Setting up a C/C++ Dev Environment

Introduction

A large share of the ModalAI software stack is written in C/C++ and so if you intend to develop applications for VOXL there’s a decent chance you’ll need to use the language. However, C/C++ is a complicated language with a very dated build system, and as such editors like VSCode can struggle to understand these projects out of the box leading to a ton of red squiggles and errors while trying to work on the project. In addition to being visually distracting, this also massively limits the functionality of these modern IDEs: features like code completion function lookup/referencing will all mostly struggle to work. In this document, I’ll outline the main ways you can set up a development environment for C/C++ to make working with the VOXL SDK a breeze.

Setup

Start by downloading VSCode from their downloads page. Also make sure to install the Dev Containers and C/C++ extensions as both will be needed to get the environment set up correctly. Also make sure to set up voxl-cross so that you’ll have the container to build in.

Process

  • Open a terminal and launch the voxl-cross container using voxl-docker -i voxl-cross. Make sure to launch this in a directory above or at the project you intend to work on (e.g. don’t runt his command in ~/git/voxl-portal/src if you intend to work on ~/git/voxl-portal/).
  • Open VSCode and CTRL+Shift+P to open and find the option Dev Containers: Attach to Running Container.... This will prompt you to pick a running container, you should pick the one corresponding to the voxl-cross instance you just spun up. From here you can use File > Open Folder to open up the project you want to work on.
  • Open up CMakeLists.txt at the root of the project you’re working on and look for the line set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS ON). If it isn’t already in the CMakeLists.txt file, add it! This line generates a .json file that tells the C/C++ extension how to interpret our project.
  • Go back to the terminal with voxl-cross in it and navigate to your project. Then run ./clean.sh, ./install_build_deps.sh qrb5165 dev and finally ./build.sh. Now check the build64 directory that was created in your project. Inside there should be a file called compile_commands.json.
  • At the root of your project, run mkdir .vscode && cd .vscode && touch c_cpp_properties.json, then open this c_cpp_properties.json file. Paste the following content:
    {
  "configurations": [
      {
          "name": "Linux",
          "compileCommands": "${workspaceFolder}/build64/compile_commands.json",
          "cStandard": "c11",
          "cppStandard": "c++17",
          "intelliSenseMode": "clang-x64"
      }
  ],
  "version": 4
}

And you should be set! A few things to keep in mind:

  • Every time you shut down voxl-cross and restart it, you’ll need to re-run the ./install_build_deps qrb5165 dev command to re-install the build dependencies for the project
  • These setup steps only apply to this project. If you go to another project you’ll need to do the same process as above. Fortunately you can just copy your .vscode dir around for easier access.
  • If you change to a 32-bit build system the link to the compile commands file may change. The command find . -name "compile_commands.json" can help you get the right path to that file so you can update your c_cpp_properties.json.