Debugging VW with QtCreator on Linux

While playing with Vowpal Wabbit I have struggled many times with impossibility to debug VW sources in IDE and check how exactly it works. As I've recently finally switched to Kubuntu I don't want to launch Win every time I'm facing small problems. And unfortunately VWs sources equipped with Visual Studio project files which doesn't support *nix platforms.

Finally I've forced myself to try building VW on Linux as Qt project with QtCeator IDE. Surprisingly it was very easy to do in just a few steps:

1. Create empty console Qt project (delete auto-generated main.cpp)
2. Import all VW's *.cc, *.cpp and *.h files in it except for active_interactor.cc
3. Add following lines to .pro file and launch qmake:
   
   LIBS += -lboost_program_options -lz -lpthread
   QMAKE_CXXFLAGS += -std=c++11
   

Now you can build and debug vw in QtCreator. Of course, that's a minimalistic setup and doesn't contain many params from original make files. But still it's enough for checking how the things were done and vw modification for specific tasks.