Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod - extra 4: makefiles

Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod -originally written by Jice Text in this tutorial was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) on 2015-09-21.

part 1: setting up part 2: map and actors part 3: dungeon building part 4: field of view part 5: preparing for combat part 6: going berserk! part 7: the GUI part 8: items and inventory part 9: spells and ranged combat part 10.1: persistence part 10.2: game menu part 11: dungeon levels and character progression extra 1: about editors and IDE extra 2: debugging extra 3: scent tracking extra 4: makefiles extra 5: more generic items

This article will show you how to use a makefile to speed up compilation. If you're using an IDE, you probably don't need this, except if you want to port your application to an OS where your IDE is not available. As with gdb, even if there are better alternatives, it's always useful to know how to quickly setup a makefile for your project.

There are several ways a makefile will speed up compilation compared to recompiling everything every time with a single g++ command line :

• we will generate an intermediate .o file for each .cpp source file, then link all .o files together to get the executable. When a single cpp file is modified, we only need to recompile its .o and link the new executable.
• using the same idea, we can generate an intermediate file for a header. This is called a precompiled header and uses the .gch extension. As long as you don't modify a header, the compiler will be able to use this precompiled header instead of re-parsing them.
• finally, make can use multi-threading to compile several .cpp files at the same time.

Note that with the current size of the project, you won't see much difference in compilation times, but the gain will get bigger and bigger as your project grows.