Show HN: C++ Editor for Teaching How to Code (opens in new tab)

It fails to compile the program

    #include <iostream>

    int main() {
        int x = 23;
        std::cout << x;
        return 0;
    }

It seems like it can't handle namespaces.

When I write

    #include <vector>

it complains, "cannot find library: vector".

I think this isn't going to be very useful for people unless you get a C++ evaluator that works correctly. There is a demo of Clang running in the browser using webassembly here: >> https://tbfleming.github.io/cib/ << but it doesn't actually work for me on Firefox. Maybe I need to use Chrome. That is probably a better option for getting C++ running in the browser.

Kinda neat but it looks extremely limited in ways that I think would frustrate a beginner:

E.g. the following doesn't do anything

  #include <iostream>
  using namespace std;
  int get7() { return 7; }
  int main() { return get7(); }

but if you manually inline the get7() it displays 7, so returning the value from another function doesn't work which seems quite odd and I think would preclude playing with recursion. (You can assign the get7() return value to a local var and return that and it works so there is a workaround but it's awkward.)

Similarly, if there are compiler errors it gives no indication as to what the error might be. C++ compiler errors are always pretty terrible but not showing anything about where even a parse went wrong could really get in the way of fixing typos etc that can really get in the way of learning the concepts.

Hello,

I was thinking at a solution to teach code easier for the beginners. C++ is the only available language for computer science classes in my country.

The project is aimed to teach coding for students as the next step after Scratch.

The language implementation is just a subset of C++, it relies on JSCPP interpreter.

I am looking for feedback and suggestions.

Thanks!

This is the definitely the best implementation of a C++ code visualization i've seen yet, kudos to the developers for this

That said, its a bit sad that this is in C++, which I think is an atrocious language for coding beginners to learn. Sure, a lot of people here might have learned C++ to start with (me included), but there are much, much better alternatives available today (pretty much any modern interpreted language for example).

I've noticed that people who are new to coding get the biggest boost to learn more about programming if they are in an environment where they can cause some kind of interesting visual output. In this regard, many languages that have good visual tooling integration (like Javascript's integration with HTML, python integrating with a GUI toolkit like pygame) really kicks it out of the park when it comes to motivating newcomers.

If the devs are reading this, could I suggest adding a 2D graphical component to this tool? unfortunately I can't think of any good, easy-to-use graphics APIs in C++ (a la the canvas API in JavaScript), but SFML and CairoMM come to mind.

Good work, pleasing UI (when it works). Please also compare with the excellent pythontutor.com website (it works with C++ too: http://pythontutor.com/cpp.html ).

Examples of differences I can see:

* pythontutor requires a backend and does not run entirely in the browser.

* pythontutor supports much more of C++ (i.e., has fewer limitations)

* shows pointers, heap and stack better.

But there are probably many more differences; would like to see a comparison among similar resources. Anyway, I think this sort of live visualization is indeed very useful; great work and please continue.

Very Nice ! But it should be stated that this is not C++ but just C++ syntax.

This code, which is clearly undefined behavior (because of dangling pointer), outputs the number 2, which is very worrisome.

    #include <iostream>
    using namespace std;
    
    int* foo() {
        int y = 2;
        return &y;
    }
    int main() {
        int* x = foo();
        cout << *x << endl;
        return 0;
    }

I would recommend not using this for educational purposes yet; it could mislead students about pointer usage.

If you create a variable as int and later change it to unsigned long long, it doesn't work anymore.

Great idea. For some reason it kept removing my semicolon after I used the time-traveling.

That's beautiful!