The SemWare Editor

If you do not yet know The SemWare Editor get to know it ASAP!
It isn't a full-blown IDE and in reality it never intended to be so.
What it really is is a powerful professional text editor.
Sadly it only has versions for Windows and DOS.
Even under Windows it isn't a GUI application.
It runs as a console window and thats OK!
No regrets, unless you're too lazy! ;-)

TSE:

Is fast! Very fast! Very much faster!
Much faster than any GUI editor you may know.

Is very, if not completely, customizable!
Its degree of customization is unbelievable.

Is possibly more powerful than VIM.
But certainly orders of magnitude easier to master.

TSE's internal macro language is very familiar and easy to learn.
To better understand its capabilities, check its features!

Trying to compare NetBeans' editor against TSE is unfair!
The NetBeans' degree of keyboard customizations is a joke.
TSE wins by far. But NetBeans wins as an IDE, of course.
But regarding text editing the game is over, TSE wins.

Even if you have a UNIX box for compiling and running, it would be advisable considering a (local or remote, virtual or not) Windows box just for the editing activity taking advantage of the superior text editing capabilities of TSE.

OPINION

In fact, the more professional you get, the less you need all those bells and whistles for text editing and building. You power and productivity will bias towards the bare bone tools without all those layers of fat of GUIs. Nevertheless, IDEs such as NetBeans survives because they integrate quite a lot of other goodies that may be important at some point of a project, remembering that if a project is growing extremely complex then there's probably some flaw or something wrong with its original design and/or engineering. The industry is rich of such defects, ranging from operating systems to all kinds of services and applications. That's all about Quality which is frequently sacrificed for Economic Pressures. And, by the way, much of this has to do with why I'm not fond of DOS, Windows, .NET, Java, Visual Studio, NetBeans and so on, on and on... All full of fat, overheads and inefficiencies and flaws which frequently require a lot of fixes, including security patches. One generally spends a great deal of time and money with maintenance to get a proportionally much lower ROI. A nightmare, in fact, a regularly employed deceiving strategy. I do not agree with this status-quo. I believe that systems and applications could be much more efficient and present much greater quality than they exhibit today.

   

NetBeans 8.1 under Solaris

If you are up to GCC under Solaris you may eventually get tempted to try a GUI development environment a.k.a Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The only major player that works on Solaris is NetBeans, but even if it weren't the only one, it would certainly be amongst the best ones. In fact, the only other major IDE that compete with NetBeans on other platforms is Eclipse, but NetBeans seems to have an edge in terms of software flexibility and openness.

The platform independent installation option of NetBeans is extremely simple to deal with. Basically, just download it and extract it to /opt. The extraction process may be tied to a subdirectory named netbeans, so that if you intend to keep multiple versions of side by side, this would probably be a problem. To workaround this lack of flexibility in the delivery method I suggest that you append version suffixes to the directory name, such as -81. Then, before setting to the extraction process, make sure you have a symbolic link from netbeans to netbeans-81.
 
NOTE

I'm completely ignoring here any slightly more sophisticated ZFS approach to dedicate a dataset under rpool/VARSHARE to be mounted under or linked at /opt. The one before the last sentence of the 1^st § and the 1^st sentence of the 2^nd § of an example of a more elaborate file-system setup can shed some light on what I mean by "a slightly more sophisticated file-system approach".

$ zfs list -o name,mountpoint .../netbeans-81
NAME              MOUNTPOINT
.../netbeans-81   /opt/netbeans-81
 
Please, note that rpool/VARSHARE/netbeans-81 was used above just as an example. It's not the recommended dataset to do so. In general, there should be one or more dedicated datasets to hold /opt subdirectories.

That is:

# cd /opt
# ln -s netbeans-81 netbeans
# unzip -q /tmp/netbeans-8.1-201510222201-cpp.zip
# rm netbeans

$ ls -lhtr /opt/netbeans-81/
total 670
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... THIRDPARTYLICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... README.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... netbeans.css
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... LICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... CREDITS.html
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... nb
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root ... etc
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root ... harness
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root ... ide
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root ... platform
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... cnd
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... dlight
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root ... bin

Perform the first run as root but before that set up properly the X11 authorization and the DISPLAY environment variable as described in this other post X11 & SSH & SU. Launch NetBeans by executing and the file /opt/netbeans-81/bin/netbeans, accept the terms of the agreement and then exit at your own discretion. At this point you're pretty much done.

I would recommend to setup the default project folder, otherwise one will get a ~/NetBeansProjects which may be less than ideal. To address this, after a first launch, look for the projectui.properties file in ~/.netbeans and edit the value of projectsFolder entry (and any other eventual ocurrences of the unwanted path):

$ find ~/.netbeans -name projectui.properties

One final detail you may like to set up is a GNOME launcher under the menu Application | Developer Tools. In addition to referencing /opt/netbeans-81/bin/netbeans you'll probably reference the nice icon located at /opt/netbeans-81/nb/netbeans.png :

 
  

GCC under DOS

It's almost incredible but GCC 5.2.0 runs under DOS on Intel 386!
Of course, there's a 32-bits DOS Extender under the hood, but anyways!
That were made possible thanks to the heroic Deloire DJGPP project.
That's an incredible achievement constrained by DOS limitations.
Naturally there are not threads under DOS, please!
But it allows you to have a great start in C++11.

Nowadays, having a virtualized DOS is easy. You can use VirtualBox, VirtualPC, and so on... The list is quite extensive. And in face of actual powerful machines and sophisticated Operating Systems the requirements to a virtual DOS are trivially fulfilled! Booting a virtual DOS is ridiculously fast. Aside from obvious restrictions from DOS (as for lack of threads), the only slightly strange is that the generated executables are excessive large (as if many libraries were statically linked in), over 1Mb, even for the insidious "Hello, world!" minimal program. But never mind, if you follow the proper steps you can live with it and compilation times aren't that bad (for a DOS).

In order to get DJGPP, the recommended approach is to visit:
http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/zip-picker.html

I think it's best not to download too much stuff, so I stuck to the minimals as seen on the above image. Once the choices are made, just click the "Tell me which files I need" and follow the instructions. By the way, there's nothing hard about the instructions. Just note that you should use the default directory C:\DJGPP, the provided unzip32 and do a couple of very simple environment variable settings (one for DJGPP and other to your PATH).

By the way, note that differently from when under a Linux or UNIX platform, the C++ compiler executable is called gpp and not usual g++ as this last one amounts to an invalid file name under wonderful DOS world.

NOTE

In addition to DOS, as long as you stick to a 32-bits world, even those provided by Windows XP and Windows 7 (32-bits), you can still you the same approach depicted above, though you should select a closer match on the drop-down list-box which operating system you'll be using. You should select Windows 2000/XP. You should get a slightly different set of files, but not that much. I know that by doing this you'll even get GCC 5.3.0 (by the time of this writing).

   

GCC under Solaris

Solaris has been evolving and being modernized a lot.
That's very welcome since it's been always a great OS!
Thus it's now much easier to get GCC working under Solaris!
The Solaris 11.3 generally available release offers GCC 4.8.2.
That's more than enough to get our fit wet with C++11.
Once a local package repository is available you just have to do:

# pkg install gcc
...

# pkg install gdb
...

NOTE

Instead of the two commands above it may be sliglhtly better to adopt the following alternative:

# pkg install --be-name developer-gnu developer-gnu

And if you want to be a little bit more cautious just add the --be-name switch in order to designate a new boot environment (BE) under which the gcc and gdb packages are to be installed. In case you take this path after a successful completion of the commands you'll have to reboot the system into the newly created BE.

In the end you can confirm what's at your disposal as follows:

# pkg info -r gcc
          Name: developer/gcc
       Summary: GCC
      Category: Development/C (...)
                Development/C++ (...)
                Development/Fortran (...)
                Development/GNU (...)
                Development/Objective C (...)
         State: Installed
     Publisher: solaris
       Version: 4.8.2
 Build Release: 5.11
        Branch: 0.175.3.0.0.30.0
Packaging Date: August 21, 2015 04:45:27 PM
          Size: 5.46 kB
          FMRI: pkg://.../gcc@4.8.2,5.11-0.175.3.0.0.30...

# pkg info -r gdb
          Name: developer/debug/gdb
       Summary: GDB 7.6
   Description: GDB, the GNU Debugger, is a ...
      Category: Development/System
         State: Installed
     Publisher: solaris
       Version: 7.6
 Build Release: 5.11
        Branch: 0.175.3.0.0.30.0
Packaging Date: August 21, 2015 04:35:57 PM
          Size: 8.93 MB
          FMRI: pkg://.../gdb@7.6,5.11-0.175.3.0.0.30...

Pretty fast, simple and cool, isn't it?
By the way, the IPS takes care of everything!
You don't have to manually tweak absolutely nothing!

NOTE

Yes, it's true that GCC is not a native compiler to Solaris and as such it will never be able to generate the most streamlined and efficient code to the platform. But as a learn and a project started tool is a quite good solution. Later on, if your project become successful you can consider the platform's native compiler and tools Oracle Solaris Studio.

  

Newlines: DOS/Windows to UNIX

If you're in UNIX and happen to have a source file originally created in DOS/Windows, then you most definitely have to get rid of the extra \r (a.k.a. ^M) that DOS\Windows inserts on a text file in order to mark line breaks.

While in vim the extra ^M are easily noticed:

#ifndef ..._BASICS_HXX^M
#define ..._BASICS_HXX^M
^M
namespace ...^M
{^M
^M
//^M
//^M
//^M
using byte = unsigned char;^M
^M 
//^M
//^M
//^M
using capacity_type = unsigned long long int;^M 
^M
} // namespace ...^M 
^M
#endif // ..._BASICS_HXX^M 
^M
~
...
~  
"basics.hxx" 20 lines, 224 characters

While still in vim simply issue the following command:

:%s/\r//g

Which means to globally (g) substitute all (%s) the \r for nothing, in other words, to remove all the \r. Just save the file and you're done. Naturally you'll find a dozen other ways to accomplish the same thing and even more efficiently by means of a myriad of alternative shell external commands. So, suit yourself :-)