Tips/Resources for Large Scale Cross-Platform Software Projects

Question

I\'m going to be starting a large scale software project involving a cross-platform GUI and heavy number crunching. I plan on writing most of the application back-end in C++ an

Answer 1

1) The structure can be the same, but if you're including files in subdirectories, make sure you use '/ and not \. The former will also work on windows.

2) I'd check out cmake ( http://www.cmake.org/ ) for managing building across multiple platforms. This will take a lot of pain out of the process for you.

3) Use STL and Boost as much as you can. These libraries have been designed with this very problem in mind. This will cover a huge portion of what you might need to do. You've already chosen the excellent Qt library, so your GUI is not an issue either. With these 3 combined, you're already most of the way there. That said, you might have to do something that is platform independent and not covered by any of these. For this I suggest you write a class that exposes a consistent interface across all platforms, and hide the nitty-gritty with preprocessor directives in the source file. It is imperative to expose a consistent interface.

4) Use SVN. I don't know how to do it on other compilers, but it is trivial in Visual Studio to get the latest revision and insert it in to some file that then gets included in your project. You can use build events to do this. Sorry I can't elaborate on other platforms.

In addition, if you have to head outside of STL, Boost, Qt etceteras, be mindful of the documentation of the API calls on all platforms. I have been bitten in the past by the behavior of a fseek() API call that wrote bytes to pad out to the destination on one implementation, but not the other. These can be a major cause of headache and another reason to try and stick to tried-and-tested libraries as mentioned above.