4 posts tagged with "ci"

C++ grants developers immense power, but with it comes the greater responsibility of managing memory. Memory leaks and access violations can bring down even the most robust applications. To combat these issues, sanitizers like AddressSanitizer (ASan) and LeakSanitizer (LSan) are invaluable tools. When it comes to addressing security, this is only the tip of the iceberg; you are expected to do more but sanitizers are an approachable starting pointing.

Despite these obvious upsides 50% of developers don't leverage these tools, integrating them into the build process often raises concerns about increased build times. This blog post explores a strategy to leverage modern build tools and parallelization to achieve exceptional memory safety without sacrificing CI speed.

In the steadily evolving landscape of C++, where incremental improvements shape the tools we use, it can quickly become a challenge to stay up to date with the latest technologies while still supporting the code already in production. If you're apart of the 61% of C++ developers, the concept of building more configurations might initially seem counterintuitive. However, it's precisely under such circumstances that this approach serves as a solution to the challenge of limited access to new features and tools within the C++ ecosystem.

By prioritizing testing a comprehensive list of configuration during CI, your team can unleash access to new features and tools, boosting productivity and ensuring project longevity and compatibility in a competitive landscape by establishing guardrails for the project.

Let's delve deeper into the compelling reasons why this DevOps approach, centered around building more configurations, deserves widespread adoption in C++ environments.

Managing build scripts, especially in C++, can be a daunting task for development teams. CMake, with its powerful toolkit, offers a solution to this challenge. In this blog, we'll delve into the world of CMake presets and explore how they can significantly reduce CI build script complexity, leading to a more efficient and enjoyable development experience.

The Challenge of Build Scripts in C++​

C++ teams often struggle with an extensive list of build systems, introducing layers of complexity. CMake, when mastered, becomes a game-changer. This blog focuses on CMake's key pillars: toolchains, presets, and build scripts. Understanding their roles and interactions is crucial for achieving a streamlined developer experience and unambiguous CI workflows.

Join us on a journey where we'll:

• Empower developers with effortless configuration and cross-platform builds.
• Simplify CI pipelines for efficient testing.
• Elevate project maintainability and collaboration across diverse environments.

One of the biggest challenges in C++ is setting up CI from scratch and of that, the biggest pain point is the system administration which can be very disconnected from the development tools. In order to bridge this gap we can leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) targeting existing machines, locally in our network or in the cloud, is an excellent enhancement to ensure consistent reproducible builds. Having version controlled configuration management tied to the codebase is key, this will allow us to deterministically install all the tools required with confidence even in the far far future.

Let's walk through adding Ansible to handle configuring a Windows virtual machine. These ideas apply to Unix environments as well but we can tackle those in a future post. Once we've gained control over our build environments, we can tackle availability and scalability by introducing Terraform to help provision and initialize new Windows instances in Azure. This two prong solution enables both a path for migrating to the cloud and establishing a hybrid setup.