C++ Hello World

C++ is the object oriented cousin to our friend C. It has some common syntax, but we can start to see the differences in our very first program.

Even from a tooling perspective, we might need to do some additional setup of our system, even just for Hello World.

Import Path

An include path is the location where our imports can be found. We can either pass this an an argument to the computer, or set is as an environment variable(CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH).

Note you may need to specify more than one directory in the path as you start to include more and more imports. Like other paths, directories can be concatenated using a semi-colon.

Without this variable being set, you may see an error like the following

hello.cpp:1:10: fatal error: 'iostream' file not found
#include <iostream>
         ^~~~~~~~~~

Library Path

A library path is the location where the compiled library definitions can be found. Similar to the import path, this can be passed in as a command line argument to the compiler, or as a environment variable(LD_LIBRARY_PATH).

Similar to the import path, you may need to include multiple directories as you use more libraries.

Hello World Example

With our include and library paths set up, we are now ready to look at the code

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
 
int main()
{
    cout << "Hello World";
}