Toy C Project Template

This is a very simple template for a C project.

It prioritises having the fewest elements and easiest setup. As a result, it cuts a few corners that you probably wouldn't want to cut in a professional C project.

But if you're using C as a learning or hobby tool, this should suit you well.

Quickstart

You will need make, clang and lldb installed. These are present by default on macOS, and on Ubuntu can be installed with sudo apt install clang lldb.

# Clone the repo, download a zip, or run...
; mkdir my-c-project && cd my-c-project
; npx degit neoeno/toy-c-project-template

# Check `make`, `clang` and `lldb` are installed
; make check

# To build and run `src/main.c`
; make run

# To run the tests in `src/test.c`
; make test

# To start `src/main.c` in the debugger
; make debug

# To start `src/test.c` in the debugger
; make debug-test

Note that a professional project would probably not use Make for all of these tasks.

How to write code

The project is structured as three files:

• src/main.c, whose main function gets run as the executable, and should probably mostly call functions in lib.c.
• src/lib.c where most of your implementation code should go.
• src/test.c, whose main function gets run as the tests.

My suggested workflow is:

• Add functions to lib.c, verifying with tests in test.c.
• Add code to main.c which calls functions in lib.c.

There is already some example code along these lines.

Tests

This project uses a very basic set of C macros to facilitate tests. You can see examples of this in src/test.c.

My intention is that you use these tests just as a way to run bits of your code in your development workflow.

You may want to experiment with creating more test macros that suit your project.