Getting started

During the course of this book, we'll be assuming the use of a GCC-based toolchain (GCC or MinGW on Windows). If you wish to use alternative toolchains (clang, MSVC, ICC, and so on), please consult the documentation provided with these for compatible commands.

To compile the examples provided in this book, makefiles will be used. For those unfamiliar with makefiles, they are a simple but powerful text-based format used with the make tool for automating build tasks including compiling source code and adjusting the build environment. First released in 1977, make remains among the most popular build automation tools today.

Familiarity with the command line (Bash or equivalent) is assumed, with MSYS2 (Bash on Windows) recommended for those using Windows.