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In this tutorial, you configure Visual Studio Code to use the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and debugger on Windows.
After configuring VS Code, you will compile and debug a simple Hello World program in VS Code. This tutorial does not teach you details about the Microsoft C++ toolset or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.
This happens every single time i try to compile any project whether it would be a template given by Dev-C when creating a windows application or something I have been working on.I save all the files like the source, resource, header and all the files created by the compiler in the same directory, 'C: Dev-Cpp ' from which I create a another.
If you have any problems, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.
Prerequisites
Dev-c couldn't save the file after editing it as google sync was using it for a long time even after it was synced. I paused google sync, restarted my computer and then the files could be saved again. After opening CB Make sure the project you're working on is open Highlight that project (on your left, it has a CB icon) File New Empty file Go through the wizard, file name should have extension.cpp (ex. HelloWorld.cpp) SAVE This creates a C source file within your project, which should open automatically. Myfile.cpp:1:22: fatal error: myheader.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. What could be causing it? Well, the basic cause is that the compiler cannot find a file called myheader.h in the directories it searches when processing the #include directive. This could be so for a number of reasons. To read from a file, use either the ifstream or fstream class, and the name of the file. Note that we also use a while loop together with the getline function (which belongs to the ifstream class) to read the file line by line, and to print the content of the file.
To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following:
Install Visual Studio Code.
Install the C/C++ extension for VS Code. You can install the C/C++ extension by searching for 'c++' in the Extensions view (⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X)).
Install the Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) compiler toolset.
If you have a recent version of Visual Studio, open the Visual Studio Installer from the Windows Start menu and verify that the C++ workload is checked. If it's not installed, then check the box and click the Modify button in the installer.
You can also install just the C++ Build Tools, without a full Visual Studio IDE installation. From the Visual Studio Downloads page, scroll down until you see Tools for Visual Studio under the All downloads section and select the download for Build Tools for Visual Studio.
This will launch the Visual Studio Installer, which will bring up a dialog showing the available Visual Studio Build Tools workloads. Check the C++ build tools workload and select Install.
Note: You can use the C++ toolset from Visual Studio Build Tools along with Visual Studio Code to compile, build, and verify any C++ codebase as long as you also have a valid Visual Studio license (either Community, Pro, or Enterprise) that you are actively using to develop that C++ codebase.
Check your Microsoft Visual C++ installation
To use MSVC from a command line or VS Code, you must run from a Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio. An ordinary shell such as PowerShell, Bash, or the Windows command prompt does not have the necessary path environment variables set.
To open the Developer Command Prompt for VS, start typing 'developer' in the Windows Start menu, and you should see it appear in the list of suggestions. The exact name depends on which version of Visual Studio or the Visual Studio Build Tools you have installed. Click on the item to open the prompt.
You can test that you have the C++ compiler, cl.exe
, installed correctly by typing 'cl' and you should see a copyright message with the version and basic usage description.
If the Developer Command Prompt is using the BuildTools location as the starting directory (you wouldn't want to put projects there), navigate to your user folder (C:users{your username}
) before you start creating new projects.
Create Hello World
From the Developer Command Prompt, create an empty folder called 'projects' where you can store all your VS Code projects, then create a subfolder called 'helloworld', navigate into it, and open VS Code (code
) in that folder (.
) by entering the following commands:
The 'code .' command opens VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your 'workspace'. As you go through the tutorial, you will see three files created in a .vscode
folder in the workspace:
tasks.json
(build instructions)launch.json
(debugger settings)c_cpp_properties.json
(compiler path and IntelliSense settings)
Add a source code file
In the File Explorer title bar, select the New File button and name the file helloworld.cpp
.
Add hello world source code
Now paste in this source code:
Now press ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+S) to save the file. Notice how the file you just added appears in the File Explorer view (⇧⌘E (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+E)) in the side bar of VS Code:
You can also enable Auto Save to automatically save your file changes, by checking Auto Save in the main File menu.
The Activity Bar on the far left lets you open different views such as Search, Source Control, and Run. You'll look at the Run view later in this tutorial. You can find out more about the other views in the VS Code User Interface documentation.
Note: When you save or open a C++ file, you may see a notification from the C/C++ extension about the availability of an Insiders version, which lets you test new features and fixes. You can ignore this notification by selecting the X
(Clear Notification).
Explore IntelliSense
In your new helloworld.cpp
file, hover over vector
or string
to see type information. After the declaration of the msg
variable, start typing msg.
as you would when calling a member function. You should immediately see a completion list that shows all the member functions, and a window that shows the type information for the msg
object:
You can press the Tab key to insert the selected member; then, when you add the opening parenthesis, you will see information about any arguments that the function requires.
Build helloworld.cpp
Next, you will create a tasks.json
file to tell VS Code how to build (compile) the program. This task will invoke the Microsoft C++ compiler to create an executable file based on the source code.
From the main menu, choose Terminal > Configure Default Build Task. In the dropdown, which will display a tasks dropdown listing various predefined build tasks for C++ compilers. Choose cl.exe build active file, which will build the file that is currently displayed (active) in the editor.
This will create a tasks.json
file in a .vscode
folder and open it in the editor.
Your new tasks.json
file should look similar to the JSON below:
The command
setting specifies the program to run; in this case that is 'cl.exe'. The args
array specifies the command-line arguments that will be passed to cl.exe. These arguments must be specified in the order expected by the compiler. This task tells the C++ compiler to take the active file (${file}
), compile it, and create an executable file (/Fe:
switch) in the current directory (${fileDirname}
) with the same name as the active file but with the .exe
extension (${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe
), resulting in helloworld.exe
for our example.
Note: You can learn more about task.json
variables in the variables reference.
The label
value is what you will see in the tasks list; you can name this whatever you like.
The problemMatcher
value selects the output parser to use for finding errors and warnings in the compiler output. For cl.exe, you'll get the best results if you use the $msCompile
problem matcher.
The 'isDefault': true
value in the group
object specifies that this task will be run when you press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B). This property is for convenience only; if you set it to false, you can still run it from the Terminal menu with Tasks: Run Build Task.
Running the build
Go back to
helloworld.cpp
. Your task builds the active file and you want to buildhelloworld.cpp
.To run the build task defined in
tasks.json
, press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B) or from the Terminal main menu choose Tasks: Run Build Task.When the task starts, you should see the Integrated Terminal panel appear below the source code editor. After the task completes, the terminal shows output from the compiler that indicates whether the build succeeded or failed. For a successful C++ build, the output looks something like this:
Create a new terminal using the + button and you'll have a new terminal (running PowerShell) with the
helloworld
folder as the working directory. Runls
and you should now see the executablehelloworld.exe
along with various intermediate C++ output and debugging files (helloworld.obj
,helloworld.pdb
).You can run
helloworld
in the terminal by typing.helloworld.exe
.
Note: You might need to press Enter a couple of times initially to see the PowerShell prompt in the terminal. This issue should be fixed in a future release of Windows.
Modifying tasks.json
You can modify your tasks.json
to build multiple C++ files by using an argument like '${workspaceFolder}*.cpp'
instead of ${file}
. This will build all .cpp
files in your current folder. You can also modify the output filename by replacing '${fileDirname}${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe'
with a hard-coded filename (for example '${workspaceFolder}myProgram.exe'
).
Debug helloworld.cpp
Next, you'll create a launch.json
file to configure VS Code to launch the Microsoft C++ debugger when you press F5 to debug the program. From the main menu, choose Run > Add Configuration.. and then choose C++ (Windows).
You'll then see a dropdown for various predefined debugging configurations. Choose cl.exe build and debug active file.
VS Code creates a launch.json
file, opens it in the editor, and builds and runs 'helloworld'.
The program
setting specifies the program you want to debug. Here it is set to the active file folder ${fileDirname}
and active filename with the .exe
extension ${fileBasenameNoExtension}.exe
, which if helloworld.cpp
is the active file will be helloworld.exe
.
By default, the C++ extension won't add any breakpoints to your source code and the stopAtEntry
value is set to false
. Change the stopAtEntry
value to true
to cause the debugger to stop on the main
method when you start debugging.
Start a debugging session
- Go back to
helloworld.cpp
so that it is the active file. - Press F5 or from the main menu choose Run > Start Debugging. Before you start stepping through the source code, let's take a moment to notice several changes in the user interface:
The Integrated Terminal appears at the bottom of the source code editor. In the Debug Output tab, you see output that indicates the debugger is up and running.
The editor highlights the first statement in the
main
method. This is a breakpoint that the C++ extension automatically sets for you:The Run view on the left shows debugging information. You'll see an example later in the tutorial.
At the top of the code editor, a debugging control panel appears. You can move this around the screen by grabbing the dots on the left side.
Step through the code
Now you're ready to start stepping through the code.
Click or press the Step over icon in the debugging control panel until the
for (const string& word : msg)
statement is highlighted.The Step Over command skip over all the internal function calls within the
vector
andstring
classes that are invoked when themsg
variable is created and initialized. Notice the change in the Variables window on the left. In this case, the errors are expected because, although the variable names for the loop are now visible to the debugger, the statement has not executed yet, so there is nothing to read at this point. The contents ofmsg
are visible, however, because that statement has completed.Press Step over again to advance to the next statement in this program (skipping over all the internal code that is executed to initialize the loop). Now, the Variables window shows information about the loop variables.
Press Step over again to execute the
cout
statement. Note As of the March 2019 version of the extension, no output is displayed until the loop completes.If you like, you can keep pressing Step over until all the words in the vector have been printed to the console. But if you are curious, try pressing the Step Into button to step through source code in the C++ standard library!
To return to your own code, one way is to keep pressing Step over. Another way is to set a breakpoint in your code by switching to the
helloworld.cpp
tab in the code editor, putting the insertion point somewhere on thecout
statement inside the loop, and pressing F9. A red dot appears in the gutter on the left to indicate that a breakpoint has been set on this line.Then press F5 to start execution from the current line in the standard library header. Execution will break on
cout
. If you like, you can press F9 again to toggle off the breakpoint.
Set a watch
Sometimes you might want to keep track of the value of a variable as your program executes. You can do this by setting a watch on the variable.
Place the insertion point inside the loop. In the Watch window, click the plus sign and in the text box, type
word
, which is the name of the loop variable. Now view the Watch window as you step through the loop.Add another watch by adding this statement before the loop:
int i = 0;
. Then, inside the loop, add this statement:++i;
. Now add a watch fori
as you did in the previous step.To quickly view the value of any variable while execution is paused on a breakpoint, you can hover over it with the mouse pointer.
C/C++ configurations
If you want more control over the C/C++ extension, you can create a c_cpp_properties.json
file, which will allow you to change settings such as the path to the compiler, include paths, C++ standard (default is C++17), and more.
You can view the C/C++ configuration UI by running the command C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI) from the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)).
This opens the C/C++ Configurations page. When you make changes here, VS Code writes them to a file called c_cpp_properties.json
in the .vscode
folder.
Visual Studio Code places these settings in .vscodec_cpp_properties.json
. If you open that file directly, it should look something like this:
You only need to add to the Include path array setting if your program includes header files that are not in your workspace or in the standard library path.
Compiler path
The compilerPath
setting is an important setting in your configuration. The extension uses it to infer the path to the C++ standard library header files. When the extension knows where to find those files, it can provide useful features like smart completions and Go to Definition navigation.
The C/C++ extension attempts to populate compilerPath
with the default compiler location based on what it finds on your system. The extension looks in several common compiler locations.
The compilerPath
search order is:
- First check for the Microsoft Visual C++ compilerOpe
- Then look for g++ on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Then g++ for Mingw-w64.
If you have g++ or WSL installed, you might need to change compilerPath
to match the preferred compiler for your project. For Microsoft C++, the path should look something like this, depending on which specific version you have installed: 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/BuildTools/VC/Tools/MSVC/14.16.27023/bin/Hostx64/x64/cl.exe'.
Reusing your C++ configuration
VS Code is now configured to use the Microsoft C++ compiler. The configuration applies to the current workspace. To reuse the configuration, just copy the JSON files to a .vscode
folder in a new project folder (workspace) and change the names of the source file(s) and executable as needed.
Troubleshooting
The term 'cl.exe' is not recognized
If you see the error 'The term 'cl.exe' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.', this usually means you are running VS Code outside of a Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio and VS Code doesn't know the path to the cl.exe
compiler.
You can always check that you are running VS Code in the context of the Developer Command Prompt by opening a new Terminal (⌃⇧` (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+`)) and typing 'cl' to verify cl.exe
is available to VS Code.
Next steps
- Explore the VS Code User Guide.
- Review the Overview of the C++ extension.
- Create a new workspace, copy your
.vscode
JSON files to it, adjust the necessary settings for the new workspace path, program name, and so on, and start coding!
Introduction
In this intermittent series, I’ll be looking at the most common error messages your C++ compiler (and linker) can produce, explaining exactly what they mean, and showing how they can be fixed (or, better still avoided). The article will specifically talk about the errors produced by the GCC command line compiler, but I’ll occasionally provide some coverage of Microsoft C++ as well. The articles are aimed at beginner to intermediate C++ programmers, and will mostly not be OS-specific.
Error Messages 101
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Compiler error messages from the GCC g++ compiler generally look like something this:
which was produced by this code:
The first line of the error says which function the following error(s) is in. The error message itself comes in four main parts; the file the error occurs in, the line number and character offset at which the compiler thinks the error occurs, the fact that it is an error, and not a warning, and the text of the message.
As well as error, the compiler can also produce warnings. These are usually about constructs that, while not being actually illegal in C++, are considered dubious, or constructs that the compiler has extensions to cover. In almost all cases, you don’t want to use such constructs, and you should treat warnings as errors; in other words, your code should always compile with zero warnings. You should also increase the level of warnings from the compiler’s default, which is usually too low. With g++, you should use at least the -Wall and -Wextra compiler options to do this:
No such file or directory
The error I’m looking at today most commonly occurs when you are including a header file using the preprocessor #include directive. For example, suppose you have the following code in a file called myfile.cpp:
and you get the following error message:
What could be causing it? Well, the basic cause is that the compiler cannot find a file called myheader.h in the directories it searches when processing the #include directive. This could be so for a number of reasons.
The simplest reason is that you want the compiler to look for myheader.h in the same directory as the myfile.cpp source file, but it can’t find it. this may be because you simply haven’t created the header file yet, but the more common reason is that you either misspelled the header file name in the #include directive, or that you made a mistake in naming the header file when you created it with your editor. Look very closely at the names in both the C++ source and in your source code directory listing. You may be tempted to think 'I know that file is there!', but if the compiler says it isn’t there, then it isn’t, no matter how sure you are that it is.
This problem is somewhat greater on Unix-like system, such as Linux, as there file names are character case sensitive, so Myheader.h, MyHeader.h, myheader.h and so on would all name different files, and if you get the case wrong, the compiler will not look for something 'similar'. For this reason, a very good rule of thumb is:
Never use mixed case when naming C++ source and header files. Use only alphanumeric characters and the underscore when naming C+++ files. Never include spaces or other special characters in file names.
Apart from avoiding file not found errors, this will also make life much easier if you are porting your code to other operating systems which may or may not respect character case.
The wrong directory?
Another situation where you may get this error message is if you have split your header files up from your C++ source files into separate directories. This is generally good practice, but can cause problems. Suppose your C++ project is rooted at C:/myprojects/aproject, and that in the aproject directory you have two sub-directorys called src (for the .cpp files) and inc (for the header files), and you put myfile.cpp in the src directory, and myheader.h in the inc directory, so that you have this setup:
Now if you compile the source myfile.cpp from the src directory, you will get the 'No such file or directory' error message. The C++ compiler knows nothing about the directory structures of your project, and won’t look in the inc directory for the header. You need to tell it to look there somehow.
One thing some people try when faced with this problem is to re-write myfile.cpp so it looks like this:
or the slightly more sophisticated:
Both of these are a bad idea, as they tie your C++ code to the project’s directory structure and/or location, both of which you will probably want to change at some point in the future. If the directory structure does change, you will have to edit all your #include directories.The better way to deal with this problem is to tell the compiler directly where to look for header files. You can do that with the compiler’s -I option, which tells the compiler to look in the specified directory, as well as the ones it normally searches:
Now the original #include directive:
will work, and if your directory structure changes you need only modify the compiler command line. Of course, writing such command lines is error prone, and you should put such stuff in a makefile, the use of which is unfortunately outside the scope of this article.
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Somewhat similar issues to those described above can occur when you want to use a third-party library. Suppose you want to use the excellent random number generating facilities of the Boost library. If you are copying example code, you may well end up with something like this in your C++ source file:
This will in all probability lead to yet another 'No such file or directory' message, as once again the compiler does not know where 'boost/random.hpp' is supposed to be. In fact, it is one of the subdirectories of the Boost installation, and on my system I can get the #include directive to work using this command line:
where /prog/boost1461 is the root directory for my specific Boost library installation.
Can’t find C++ Standard Library files?
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One last problem that beginners run into is the inability of the compiler to find header files that are part of the C++ Standard Library. One particular favourite is this one:
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where you are learning C++ from a very, very old book. Modern C++ implementations have not contained a file called iostream.h for a very long time indeed, and your compiler is never going to find it. You need to use the correct, standard names for such headers (and to get a better book!):
If this still fails, then there is almost certainly something very wrong with your GCC installation. The GCC compiler looks for Standard Library files in a subdirectory of its installation, and locates that directory relative to the directory containing the compiler executable, so if the Standard Library headers are available, the compiler should always find them.
Conclusion
This article looked at the 'No such file or directory' message of the GCC C++ compiler. If you get this message you should:
- Remember that the compiler is always right in situations like this.
- Look very closely at the file name to make sure it is correct.
- Avoid naming file using mixed-case or special characters.
- Use the -I compiler option to tell the compiler where to look for files.
- Make sure that GCC is correctly installed on your system.