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gcc, colorgcc, lcov, valgrind

At home I usually don't create makefiles when my program is so small that it fits into one file.

However compilation errors are more readable with colorgcc, and having as much warnings/errors at compilation time as possible is even better.

.bashrc:

GCC_ARGS="-Wall -Werror -pedantic -Weffc++ -Wshadow -ggdb --coverage"
alias g++="/usr/lib/colorgcc/bin/g++ $GCC_ARGS"
alias gcc="/usr/lib/colorgcc/bin/gcc $GCC_ARGS"

The -ggdb puts debug symbols to the binary and --coverage will make the binary create .gcda and .gcno files at runtime.

To create a nice coverage-html lcov needs more steps (3) than I'm willing to type everytime so the following line in the .bashrc do the work. Note that the lcov_all is function, because argument passing is not possible with aliases.

alias lcov_reset="lcov --directory . -z ; rm -f ./lcov.info"
alias lcov_capture="lcov --directory . --capture -o lcov.info"
alias lcov_html="rm -rf ./cov ; mkdir cov ; genhtml -o ./cov lcov.info"
function lcov_all() { lcov_reset ; $1 ; lcov_capture ; lcov_html ; }

The best way to alter valgrind's behavior modifying the .valgrindrc:

--leak-check=full 
--show-reachable=yes 
--malloc-fill=0xaa 
--free-fill=0xbb

So when I program follow the following steps:

1. Edit the source.
2. g++ <sourcefile>
3. run <binary>
4. Check leaks: valgrind <binary>
5. If coverage is needed, lcov_all <binary>