Building the code

Although a large number of 3rd party libraries are used throughout the book, all these libraries, as well as all the solutions provided in the book are cross-platform and run on all platforms. However, the code has been developed and tested with Visual Studio 2017 v15.6/7 on Windows 10 and Xcode 9.3 on Mac OS 10.13.x.

If you are using Xcode on a Mac, there are two features used in the book that are not available with the LLVM toolset included in Xcode; these are the filesystem library and std::optional. However, these have been designed based on the Boost.Filesystem and Boost.Optional libraries and the use of the mentioned standard libraries in the proposed solutions is easily interchangeable with the Boost libraries. In fact, the accompanying code is written so that it works with either of the two; controlling which one to use is done with several macros. Instructions for building either with one or another are provided below, although the same information is also available in the source archive.

In order to support most of the development environments and build systems you could use on various platforms, the code is provided with CMake scripts. These are used to generate projects or build scripts for your preferred toolset. If you do not have CMake installed on your machine, you can get it from https://cmake.org/. Below, you can find instructions for using CMake to generate Visual Studio and Xcode scripts. For other tools, please refer to the CMake documentation, if necessary.