Compiling and Building a Plugin
Notes on setting up a development environment are given in the tutorial
"C++ Development Environment".
Notes on setting up Cutter's C++ preferences are in the tutorial
"Pixar's Devkit: Cutter's Devkit Authoring Environment"
With the C++ source code file open on Cutter's desktop compiling, linking
and building a plugin is activated by the keyboard
shortcut alt+e, control+e or apple+e. A Process Monitor
window will open and report the creation of a plugin. For example,
if the plugin presented in the tutorial,
"RifPlugin: Particles"
is built on OSX or Linux the following message would appear - figure 1.
Figure 1 - Comfirmation of a successful build on OSX
On Windows the process monitor would report,
Creating library Particles.lib and object Particles.exp
On Windows the plugin (DSO) would be named Particles.dll while on Linux and OSX the plugin
would be named Particles.so.
To create a plugin DSO (dynamic shared object) Cutter first generates a text file
that will tell the host developement environment what to do. Once that file has been
created it is automatically executed by Cutter and as a consequence a plugin is,
hopefully, created.
On Windows the text file would be named "Build_Particles.bat", while on OSX and Linux
it would be named "Makefile.Particles". There is no need for the reader to edit these
text files because they are automatically handled by Cutter. For additional information
about customized compiling and linking refer to,
"Pixar's Devkit: Cutter's Devkit Authoring Environment" ".