C Project Template

My take on setting up a nice environment for developing C (no C++) on MacOS.

Features

• CMake

  Like it or not, it's the most widely used tool for building C.
  Without reinventing the wheel, I followed the project structure recommended by this book.

• googletest

  Again, most popular tool, so I sticked to it.
  The setup with CMake was a breeze.
  Truth being told, the most popular unit-testing framework is "I don't write unit tests for C", followed by "I write unit tests, but I don't use any framework", which you may decide to believe.

• clang-tidy

  Static-analysis tool that catches a good amount of mistakes at copmile-time.
  Unfortunately, it doesn't come preinstalled on Mac, but you can work it around.

• Sanitizers

  Address Sanitizer (ASan), Undefined Behaviour Sanitizer (UBSan), and Thread Sanitizer (TSan) for runtime analysis.
  Here and here for more info.

• Remote-Containers

  Thanks to the VSCode Remote Containers extension, you can try your application in a Docker container running Ubuntu 20.4.

• valgrind, strace, ltrace

  These tools aren't available on Mac, but you can use them inside the Docker container.
  You may use that Docker image to play around with gcc and gdb too.

Requirements

Install these programs on your machine:

• CMake
• Docker
• clang-tidy

PS: To install clang-tidy, install llvm with Homebrew first, then add this alias to the .bashrc:

alias clang-tidy='/opt/homebrew/opt/llvm/bin/clang-tidy'

Then install these VSCode extensions:

• ms-vscode.cpptools
• ms-vscode.cmake-tools
• ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers

How to use it

Everything should work out of the box: building, running, tests, and using the integrated debugger.
If you're not familiar with the VSCode extension cmake-tools, this tutorial will help you with the first steps.

If you want to develop using the remote container, open the Command Palette and type Remote-Containers: Reopen in Container (the Docker daemon should be running already).
Then delete the build directory, and build the project again.

Finally, for strace, ltrace, and valgrind, open the remote container and:

valgrind path-to-executable
strace path-to-executable
ltrace path-to-executable
gdb path-to-executable

FAQ

googletest isn't in C

Indeed, but for most use cases it's all macros and doesn't look much different from regular C code.

Others

• A very good list of compiler warnings you may want to add:
  http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/2019/01/compiler-warnings.html

• Here's a tiny program that you can use to try out the Address Sanitizer.
  Copy it into apps/main.c, select the Asan variant, build, and run it.

#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    int *x = malloc(10 * sizeof(int));
    free(x);
    return x[5];
}

TODOs

// TODO LORIS: maybe link the STC library, useful for general purpose programs

// TODO LORIS: change the testing library, see the "Testing" section here: pikestyle