C Conway’s Game of Life

Or… CCGL.

This is the Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton, coded in C.

This supports Windows and Unix-like (Linux and MacOS¹).

Compiling

The following compiler command is going to place the executable on bin folder.

Linux

Requirements:

• libncurses (Ubuntu/Debian).
• ncurses-devel (Fedora/RHEL).
• GCC/Clang.

Ensure the requirements are installed.

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libncurses-dev

# Fedora/RHEL
sudo dnf install ncurses-devel

For compiling, you can use GCC or Clang. For GCC:

gcc main.c includes/*.c -lncurses -o bin/main

For Clang:

clang main.c includes/*.c -lncurses -o bin/main

Ensure the executable has permission to run:

chmod +x bin/main

macOS

Requirements:

• ncurses.
• GCC.

Ensure the requirements are installed.

brew install ncurses

To compile, use GCC:

gcc main.c includes/*.c -I/usr/local/opt/ncurses/include -L/usr/local/opt/ncurses/lib -lncurses -o bin/main

Windows

Requirements:

• GCC (Install using MinGW or MSYS2).

Compiling:

gcc main.c includes\*.c -o bin\main.exe

Usage

Linux and macOS

<bin> <height> <width> [<fullness>]

• <bin> — Replace with your binary file.
  • On Linux/macOS the default is bin/main
  • On Windows the default is bin\main.exe
• <height> <width> — Height and width of the board.
• <fullness> (optional) — The fullness percentage of active cells (integer from 0 to 100).
  • 0 means empty.
  • 100 means full.

Footnotes

1. MacOS not tested, tester needed! ↩