Quote Originally Posted by khh View Post
There are a lot of things you need system calls for, though, like GUI and scanning directories and such. So Firefox must be using preprocessor directives, or libraries which uses them.
I said little preprocessor. I've looked at the Firefox code because I reverse engineered a chunk of it. All of this stuff uses a NPWindow object, almost all of the preprocessor is in there.

Console programs are normally opened from the terminal, though. And if you do that, then the terminal doesn't close and you'll see the output. It's just if you open it by double clicking on the executable that you won't see the text, but then that's no how the programs are supposed to work. If you want those kinds of programs you need GUI.
But stick with the terminal while learning, GUIs can be a pain.

Funny thing, I've got C++ as a university subject this year. Of the things we'll learn this year, there was only one thing I haven't done before.
But I'm sure that you'll learn better technique and optimization techniques that you currently don't know. Assuming the professor is competent, I had a professor in college who was a good C++ programmer in 1995, but he stuck to those techniques, so we were taught no modern designs. C++ coding changes very quickly, if you don't stay on top of it, you can fall behind quickly.