Using VSCode for C (in CSC173)

Using VisualStudio Code for C (in CSC173)

George Ferguson

This document was written for VisualStudio Code 1.57.1 and tested on macOS 11.5.1 Big Sur.

VSCode can use any folder as a “workspace.” So to start a new project, just open a folder and then create files in it. Who knew?
To add a file, select “New File” from the File menu
You will name the file when you save it, e.g., “hello.c” (I hate that)
VSCode will compile your file as you work on it and flag any errors
Click the “Run and Debug” button on the left side of the VSCode window to run your program.
It asked some questions about setting up a run configuration (I guess), but the obvious answers seemed to work.
However the output in the VSCode console is very verbose. And, for example, the output of my Hello World program is printed as: “@"Hello world!\r\n"”
Did I ask for that? Perhaps. Who knows what the run configurations mean... Clicking the gear icon or selecting “Open configurations” from the Run menu opens a file named “launch.json” that is somehow part of your VSCode project. Great.
Selecting “New Terminal” from the Run menu gave me a command shell in the project directory. From there, I could run my program by typing ./hello just like I would from the mac Terminal (or from my old VT100 back in the day).
Not sure what you’re supposed to do if you want to run under a debugger within VSCode...
I don’t see anyway to “clean” a project. In fact, I don’t see anything about projects.
I wouldn’t recommend this tool for Computer Science majors.

Open Preferences (from the application menu in macOS, somewhere else on other platforms)
Select “Settings”
It seems like you can have per-user and per-workspace settings using the tabs in the top-left of the Settings pane
Look for “C_cpp > Default: C Standard” and select “c99” from the menu
I then found “C_cpp > Default: Compiler Args” and there’s a link that says “Edit in settings.json”. Ok...
Put the following between the square brackets (which denotes a JSON list): "-Wall", "-Werror". Be sure to include the quote marks. You are adding two strings to that list.
Save the file.
I went back to hello.c and clicked the green play button at the top-left, but I don’t see those compiler arguments in the console output.
Hmmm...
For CSC173: Do not submit code that does not compile with the required compiler arguments!
Update: It seems like the file tasks.json in the .vscode directory specifies the arguments for the compiler. So you could edit that (JSON) to include the required options as strings after “-g” and before “${file}” which is presumably the name of the file being compiled (really? just one file?).
Yes, now I see those options in the Terminal output after I click the green play button.
So what was that other stuff about???