Settings up your computer for C++ programming can be daunting. For beginners, Xcode is the best IDE for macOS, the Visual Studio IDE is one of the most popular and best IDE on windows, and QtCreator is a good choice on Linux. Installation and setup is straightforward, but the IDEs require significant disk storage.

Visual Studio Code is a free source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. C/C++ support for Visual Studio Code is provided by a Microsoft C/C++ extension to enable cross-platform C and C++ development on Windows, Linux, and macOS. The Code Runner extension allows execution of single files. For project compilation, consisting of multiple files, the C/C++ Makefile Project extension can be used.

The new M1 MacBook Pro 13-inch has a shared CPU/CPU memory architecture. Here we compare the speed of the Apple M1 GPU to some other Macs. The results for the Apple M1 are excellent. They are on par with the Radeon Pro 560X and faster for up to about a thousand atoms.

The new Apple M1 chip is the first chip designed specifically for the Mac. It is is the first ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. Compiling software requires a few changes. it is also possible to generate ‘Universal binaries’ that run on both the M1 and intel cpus.

Rocks is an open-source Linux cluster distribution that enables end users to easily build computational clusters. Rocks can be run under virtualization for testing purposes. Here the setup for rocks 7.0 under VMware Fusion 12 will be explained.