Exercism C++ Track

Exercism Exercises in C++

Contributing Guide

Please see the contributing guides

The most useful way to start contributing to this track is to review Pull Requests and/or some of the open track issues. There are not many active contributors, so anyone reviewing PRs or Issues, even just to +1 someone elses opinion, is appreciated.

Adding an exercise

Here is a list of things that need to be done to add an exercise to this track.

1. Add the exercise under the exercises/ directory.
2. Create your test suite based on the canonical tests in the problem specifications repo, and add a comment at the top of the test suite noting the version of the test suite it implements.
3. Create an example solution and name the files example.cpp and example.h. example.cpp is optional but encouraged.
4. Add the test to the list in the root CMakeLists.txt file.
5. Add the test to the config.json file. The configlet can help generate a unique UUID. You can download configlet using the script in bin/fetch-configlet.
6. Add at least one topic for the exercise in the config.json file. Check the available topics in TOPICS.txt.
7. Use the configlet tool to generate the README for your exercise.
8. Try to match the formatting used in the other tests as closely as possible.

Testing an exercise

The Exercism build system has two unusual constraints. First, example solutions must be named example.h and example.cpp; this prevents Exercism from sending these files to the student. Second, student solutions must be named <exercise>.h and <exercise>.cpp, for example anagram.h and anagram.cpp.

The current CMake build system navigates this with an unusual approach: it copies all example solutions from the exercises/ tree to an alternate directory (which is ignored by git), renames the solutions as if they were student exercises, and runs a complete build in this new directory.

Maintainers can largely ignore the alternate exercise directory if they recopy their example solution before running a build. Re-running CMake will recopy all exercise files.

For example, a maintainer can copy, configure, compile, and test all exercises by running the following from the root directory:

cmake . && make

For an individual exercise, in this example anagram, the maintainer should edit:

exercises/anagram/example.h
exercises/anagram/example.cpp
exercises/anagram/anagram_test.cpp

Then copy, configure, compile, and test with:

cmake . && make test_anagram