Rule of Thumb

If there's any way you can avoid writing it in C or C++, then avoid it. The potential for slight performance gains is almost always nowhere near worth the cost of an application that could explode at any time.

That being said, sometimes C really is the right tool for the job...

Vital Tools

• GDB: The GNU Debugger
• Valgrind: Program analysis tool, excellent for checking memory access

Potentially Useful Tools

Memory Management

Tools to catch or eliminate memory leaks.

• Boehm Garbage Collector for C/C++: About as fast as malloc, and much, much easier

Static Checking

Static analysis of source code to catch certain classes of errors.

• splint
• cppcheck

Concurrency

• Always favor multiple processes over multiple threads
• Avoid using shared memory.
• Try to use a communication mechanism such as pipes or posix message queues over shared memory, even for threads in the same process.

GCC Options

DON'T IGNORE COMPILER WARNINGS!

Important Note: some of the gcc stack-checking options will cause valgrind to report writes to unallocated memory. You've been warned.

• -Wall, -Wextra, -Wpointer-arith: make GCC complain more about bad things you could be doing
• -fstack-protector, -fstack-protector-all: Detect some buffer overflows/stack smashing
• -fstack-check: Helps the OS catch programs that exceed stack bounds. Mostly useful for multi-threaded programs.
• -fbounds-check: Bounds check arrays (only good in gfortran and gcj)
• -ftrapv: Trap when overflow occurs.