C/C++

Most Banana Pro programs found on the Internet are C/C++ programs. The main reasons for this are speed critical applications: interpreters, such as Python, are much slower compared to compiled programs such as C/C++ ones. In this section, we will have a closer look at the Linux C/C++ compiler called GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). GCC includes frontends for both the C and C++ compiler as well as libraries for these languages. We install the C and C++ compiler with the following command:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make

Additionally, we install make, a utility that helps the compiling and linking of C/C++ files. We again start with a very simply "Hello world!" example, which we call hello.c:

nano hello.c

We can then add the following content:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    puts("Hello world!");
    return 0;
}

In the preceding example, we include standard input/output headers (stdio.h). The main entry point of the program has no arguments (void) and...