Alyssa writes her code in several C++ and header files. She plans to later reuse some of the code in a generic 3D library of her own and prefers to organize that into a subdirectory. Now it is time to compile her program and begin debugging it. First, she configures two environment variables to tell iCompile where her libraries are stored:

# Set the custom INCLUDE and LIBRARY directories setenv INCLUDE /u/alyssa/g3d/include:/usr/include/SDL setenv LIBRARY /u/alyssa/g3d/lib

(She'll probably put these two lines in her .cshrc file so she doesn't have to type them in every terminal window). To compile her ray tracer, she just enters the project directory and runs iCompile:

# Build (and document, and run) the program cd graphics/raytrace icompile --doc --run

Alyssa used the doc option to automatically create HTML documentation for her code using Doxygen. The run option automatically launches her program if compilation succeeds.

With that one command, iCompile compiled all of her code to object files and linked the object files to create an executable named raytrace based on the parent directory name. From the headers she included, iCompile automatically detected that her program needed to be linked against SDL and G3D, which it located using her INCLUDE and LIBRARY environment variables.

iCompile also detected that G3D requires the JPEG and zlib libraries and that her program uses multiple threads and needs the pthreads library. All of these were located in system directories and linked appropriately.