Development On the Pi

With the simple understanding I gained of GPIO and of simple electronic components it was time to go back to the land I understand well.  I have been developing software from very early on in my life, I enjoy software design and implementation.  I am very lucky to be ably to work in a field that I enjoy as much as I do.

I have been involved in open source was well as commercial software development, as well as a programmer for hire.  I am well versed in many different programming languages on many different computer platforms.  However, my love has always been c++.  the power and flexibility as well as the pureness of the language is simply fantastic for a developer.  As such, I wanted to see if the Pi supported my development environment of choice.

I prefer the gcc++ compiler, with the QT libraries, and for  an editor I prefer the qtcreator editor.  It is a nice IDE with full debugging support as well as built in support for QT extensions.  To my delight, I found that there was a build for QT in the repository.  It was an older version, then the currently released version, but it was QT.

I wanted to use QT because it is cross platform, and knowing what I had planned, I would need that ability to code once and use in many places.  This was an important choice for me, and as luck would have it I would be able to develop quickly.

After searching the internet for hours on how to get it setup and configured correctly, I found that it was not much different then any other install I have done.  However, there were a few twists, I will talk about this soon.

Let me be clear, the Pi out of the box has a plethora of development tools available.  There are several cross platform languages to select from, my choices were out of familiarity and comfort level.  I knew the hardware side of this project was going to drive me nuts, I did not want the development tools and language I selected to add to the frustration level.

So, to keep this project some what sane I decided to stick with the development tools I know best.  I suggest anyone reading this to keep this in mind.  If the hardware side is easy, perhaps challenge yourself with a harder programming language.