What tools do you use to develop C++ applications on Linux? [closed]

I develop C++ applications in a Linux environment. The tools I use every day include Eclipse with the CDT plugin, gdb and valgrind.
What tools do other people use? Is there anything out there for Linux that rivals the slickness of Microsoft Visual Studio?

Solution 1:

I use a bunch of terminal windows. I have vim running on interesting source files, make and g++ output on another for compiler errors or a gdb session for runtime errors. If I need help finding definitions I run cscope and use vim's cscope support to jump around.

Eclipse CDT is my second choice. It's nice but huge, ungainly and slow compared to vim.

Using terminal windows and vim is very flexible because I do not need to carry 400 MB of Java around with me I can use SSH sessions from anywhere.

I use valgrind when I need to find a memory issue.

I use strace to watch what my software is doing on a system call level. This lets me clean up really stupid code that calls time(0) four times in a row or makes too many calls to poll() or non-blocking read() or things like calling read() on a socket to read 1 byte at a time. (That is super inefficient and lazy!)

I use objdump -d to inspect the machine code, especially for performance sensitive inner loops. That is how I find things like the slowness of the array index operator on strings compared to using iterators.

I use oprofile to try to find hot spots in optimized code, I find that it often works a little better than gprof, and it can do things like look for data and instruction cache misses. That can show you where to drop some helpful prefetch hints using GCC's __builtin_prefetch. I tried to use it to find hot mis-predicted branches as well, but couldn't get that to work for me.

Update: I've found that perf works way better than oprofile. At least on Linux. Learn to use perf and love it as I do.

Solution 2:

g++ of course, but also Code::Blocks which is an absolutely fantastic cross platform IDE (Win32, *nix, Mac).

I use the nightly (more like weekly lately) builds from the SVN. It has almost all the bells and whistles you would expect from a modern IDE. It's really a truly fantastic Open Source project.

Also, on Linux you get the joy of using Valgrind which is probably the best memory tracker (it does other things as well) tool that money can buy. And it's free :) Track down memory leaks and more with ease.

And there is just so much more! Linux is such a great dev platform :)

(edit) Just realized you mentioned Valgrind in your question, silly me for reading it too fast.