Lecture 0: Introduction

Slide Deck Slide Deck - Dr. Sueda

About The Class

Subject Matter

Questions:

Quiz Time!

GPU vs. CPU

cpu vs gpu

C++

C++ is in some ways a combination of Java and C. It has syntax and a lot of other features borrowed from C, but also supports object-oriented programming similar to Java. One interesting aspect of C++ programming is that it is (typically, for most use cases and with a few small syntax changes) backwards compatibile with C. You can, for all intents and purposes, write a program in C and use a C++ compiler to compile it.

Perhaps one of the most notorious things about C++ (or at least one of the biggest problems the language currently faces) is building, especially when it comes to using and compiling with libraries.

Just like C, C++ can be compiled using Makefiles. But usually, we’ll use another program to automatically generate those Makefiles, called CMake.

This is a bit odd, because we’ve got quite a chain in order to compile our source code.

First we use CMake to generate a Makefile. Then, we use Make to execute this make file, in turn calling g++ or another actual compiler to compile the code.

If we opt to use and IDE instead of compiling on the commandline, we can still use CMake. That’s one of the reasons its so commonly used for C++ compilation.

CMake can actually generate a ton of different build files, so chances are good that if you are using some other IDE it will still be supported.

However, I am an avid Visual Studio user and I kind of don’t care for using CMake to build my projects. So in addition to CMake configuration, I also include ready-built Visual Studio project files for all base codes. So as long as you are using the latest version of Visual Studio (2017), you don’t need to bother with CMake - you can just use my provided files.

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