In industry, you will be using some form of integrated development environment. In ECE 150, because there are so many IDEs available, we have chosen to focus on Eclipse, as it is the only IDE that is cross-platform. Some of you, however, will discover that an online compiler is sufficient for this course.

If you are having issues installing Eclipse or some other IDE, then by all means, start using replit.com to start doing your assignments and the examples given in class. You can create an account, and any program you author will be stored on that site for you. You can even share your programs with your peers.

Please note, when you create a new project (i.e., a "+New repl"), be sure to choose C++11 as the Language. If you choose C++, this uses an older standard, and we are currently using the C++ 2011 standard in this course.

The reason for posting this is not to condone using this site for this course, but rather, a number of students have already indicated that they successfully passed ECE 150 using only replit.com as their development environment, and if we suggest you cannot complete the course with replit.com, but you never-the-less successfully do, then this will break your trust in us. Instead, we want you to understand that you need to learn an IDE, but right now, the most important outcome is learning to program, and if installing and getting an IDE to work is getting in the way of that outcome, then please do use replit.com.

Intellectual property warning

Warning: Projects, however, must be done individually, and if you have the default (or free) replit.com account, all of your projects will be publicly visible, and therefore, one of your peers may deduce your user name and project name and download your project and copy it. If this is done, you are 100% responsible for that act of plagiarism, as it is your responsibility to protect your intellectual property. You can get a private account by paying either 50 USD per year (this is the current annual fee, although this may increase), or right now they have the option to pay by month, at a rate of 5 USD per month. Of course, this option may be withdrawn at any time by the domain owners. One nice benefit is that you can show your source code to prospective employers without having your peers access that source code.

Now, once the term is completed, you may ask, can I not have my intellectual property publicly available? Yes, but again, you are responsible for protecting your intellectual property from plagiarism, and therefore it is recommended:

• You remove all references to Waterloo or ECE 150 in your source code.
• You change the names of any functions or classes to be significantly different from those used in the assignments and projects of ECE 150 so that a naive student looking to plagiarize cannot easily find your solutions.
• Add additional changes so that your solutions solve a similar but not identical problem to that given in ECE 150.

Again, even if you take all these steps, it may happen that a future student finds your source code and plagiarizes it. At that time, you may be called before the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies to account for your actions, and you may be responsible for those actions even after you have completed the course.

Final warnings

Please note, you are using an IDE that does not have a debugger, so this may make finding issues with your source code more difficult.

Consequently, if you are not having significant issues with Eclipse or some other IDE, please use that platform. If you cannot get another IDE up and running, and are becoming frustrated, please, focus on learning the course material first with replit.com, and then later, try to continue to get a proper IDE installed and working on your computer.

For electrical engineering students

If you are in electrical engineering, while we would prefer you learning to use a real IDE, it is likely that replit.com is sufficient; however, if you are intending to or considering a transfer to computer engineering, please try to make the transition to a real IDE as soon as possible.

For computer engineering students

If you are in computer engineering, you should want to use a real debugger, and you should actively try to move away from using replit.com if that was your first choice due to difficulties with Eclipse or other IDEs. It is not in your interest to continue to use replit.com, as you will need to use debuggers in future courses if you wish to succeed.