Documentation Generation

Documentation can be automatically generated from source code comments. This is similiar to docstrings in Python. To distinguish between regular comments and documentation comments for C and C++, special comment blocks (/**, /*!, /// or //!) have to be used.

These special comments will then be consumed by a documentation generation tool. For C and C++, the most renowned tool is Doxygen. It generate's the complete source code documentation as website or pdf file automatically including links and generating diagrams. Sphinx offers a viable, more modern alternative.

Doxygen

Creating the complete documentation is as easy as calling

doxygen Doxyfile

This requires to have a configuration file in place - for an example see one of my prior project's Doxyfile. This file can be written manually or created via a GUI tool called doxywizard (usually installed with doxygen).