A simple example

We'll now go through the steps necessary to build a simple Neutrino system that runs on a standard PC and prints out the text "Hello, world!" — the classic first C program.

Let's look at the spectrum of methods available to you to run your executable:

If your environment is:	Then you can:
Self-hosted	Compile and link, then run on host
Cross-development, network filesystem link	Compile and link, load over network filesystem, then run on target
Cross-development, debugger link	Compile and link, use debugger as a "network filesystem" to transfer executable over to target, then run on target
Cross-development, rebuilding the image	Compile and link, rebuild entire image, reboot target.

Which method you use depends on what's available to you. All the methods share the same initial step — write the code, then compile and link it for Neutrino on the platform that you wish to run the program on.

Note: You can choose how you wish to compile and link your programs: you can use tools with a command-line interface (via the qcc command) or you can use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with a graphical user interface (GUI) environment. Our samples here illustrate the command-line method.

The "Hello, world!" program itself is very simple:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main (void)
{
    printf ("Hello, world!\n");
    return (0);
}

You compile it for PowerPC (big-endian) with the single line:

qcc -V gcc_ntoppcbe hello.c -o hello

This executes the C compiler with a special cross-compilation flag, -V gcc_ntoppcbe, that tells the compiler to use the gcc compiler, Neutrino-specific includes, libraries, and options to create a PowerPC (big-endian) executable using the GCC compiler.

To see a list of compilers and platforms supported, simply execute the command:

qcc -V

If you're using an IDE, refer to the documentation that came with the IDE software for more information.

At this point, you should have an executable called hello.