What toolchains exist for Continuous Integration with C++?

Question

Continuous Integration toolchains for .NET, Java, and other languages are relatively well defined, but the C++ market seems to have a lot of diversity.

By CI "toolchain" I specifically mean tools for the build scripts, automated testing, coding standards checking, etc.

What are C++ teams using for CI toolchains?

Aldred

"(And why do our toolchains suck so bad compared to Java/.NET programmers??!?". That's a whole other question in itself.... – Niedersachsen

Voting to close as off topic. – Cooperstein

Answer 1

Another option might be buildbot.

It's written in python, but is not just for python apps. It can execute any script for doing your build. If you look at their success stories, there appear to be a wide variety of languages.

Cedillo

Answer 2

We implemented our C++ cross platform continous integration infrastructure using Parabuild

http://www.viewtier.com/products/parabuild/screenshots.htm

We were able to integrate every sort of Win/Mac/Linux QA tool with it and it's really easy to install and maintain: it's one click installation on every platform and the web interface is very handy.

While evaluating several continous integration servers the main problem was that they were Java-biased: Parabuild, on the other hand, fits well in the C++ cross platform development and QA workflow

Damales

what build system are you using on Linux? We can't find anything that would do an offline build and hopefully will be easy to maintain and integrated with eclipse – Bulb

We use cmake as main build system: you can find more informations at cmake.org. It's cross platform and can also generate eclipse projects as described in vtk.org/Wiki/CMake:Eclipse_UNIX_Tutorial#CMake_with_Eclipse – Damales

Update: we are currently using Jenkins jenkins-ci.org also (was Hudson). One interesting ability of Jenkins for distibuted build is its ability to remote install himself on slave build nodes. This is very handy in order to scale your infrastructure since you just need to install and maintain one, and only one, Jenkins instance on the master build node. – Damales

Answer 3

Visual Build Professional is my favorite tool for pulling together all the other tools. Windows only, of course, but it integrates with all flavors of Visual Studio and a host of test tools, source controls tools, issue trackers, etc. It is windows only, though. I know that's not the entire stack, but it's a start.

Quits

Answer 4

G'day,

We actually faced this problem at a site where I was contracting previously.

One bloke sat down and wrote tools, mainly shell scripts, to

1. check out the current code base every hour or so and do a build to check if it was broken, and
2. check out the latest good build and do a complete build and run about 8,000 regression tests.

We just couldn't find anything commercially available to do this and so Charlie sat down and wrote this in bash shell scripts and it was running on HP-UX.

cheers, Rob

Couscous

Answer 5

As with seemingly every other task in C++, I'm just barely limping along with continuous integration. My setup starts with Eclipse. I set it to generate make files for my projects. I have ant scripts that do the overall build tasks by running 'make all' or 'make clean' on the appropriate makefiles. These ant scripts are part of my project, and I have to update them when I add a new build configuration or a new piece to the system. It's not that bad though.

I use CruiseControl to actually run the builds. Each project (all one of them) has an ant script of its own that performs build specific tasks (copying artifacts, processing results), calling into the project ant script to do the building.

I had to use cppunit for my testing and process the results with an xslt file I found somewhere. I also have the wrong svn revision label on each build because I can't find a suitable svn labeler. All I can find is half-completed years-old code and people arguing that other people are doing it wrong.

It looks to me like CC is a dying system, but I haven't found anything better for C++. Then again, I also feel like C++ is a dying language, so maybe it's bigger than just this.

Peep

C++ isn't dying, but most of its strengths only shine in niche markets. – Walkabout

Also... I recommend looking at CxxTest, if you have some time to kill. The project went nearly dead for a while, but I believe it's been picked up by new maintainers. By default it produces output compatible with either GCC's "file:line: message" or ICC/MSVC's "file(line): message". It would be very easy to create a jUnit-compatible XML output for it. – Walkabout

Answer 6

We used scons for continuous integration run by a central build server. Some projects migrated to buildbot.

I'm now getting into rake and considering solutions as surveyed in this blog. Fowler mentions that ThoughtWorks occasionally use rake for their build scripting in his Continuous Integration article.

Spermic