std::cout won't print

Is there any circumstance when std::cout << "hello" doesn't work? I have a c/c++ code, however the std::cout doesn't print anything, not even constant strings (such as "hello").

Is there any way to check if cout is able/unable to open the stream? There are some member functions like good(), bad(), ... but I don't know which one is suitable for me.

Make sure you flush the stream. This is required because the output streams are buffered and you have no guarantee over when the buffer will be flushed unless you manually flush it yourself.

std::cout << "Hello" << std::endl;

std::endl will output a newline and flush the stream. Alternatively, std::flush will just do the flush. Flushing can also be done using the stream's member function:

std::cout.flush();

std::cout won't work on GUI apps!

Specific to MS Visual Studio: When you want a console application and use MS Visual Studio, set project property "Linker -> System -> SubSystem" to Console. After creating a new Win32 project (for a native C++ app) in Visual Studio, this setting defaults to "Windows" which prevents std::cout from putting any output to the console.

To effectively disable buffering you can call this:

std::setvbuf(stdout, NULL, _IONBF, 0);

Alternatively, you can call your program and disable output buffering in the command line:

stdbuf -o 0 ./yourprogram --yourargs

Keep in mind this is not usually done for performance reasons.