General Development Archive

The name Fabrice Bellard may not be recognizable to a lot of people, but the work he carries out as a programmer and computer scientist is. . . . He is a very talented programmer, and his latest project demonstrates once again just how talented he is. Using the super-fast JavaScript engines that now come as standard in popular web browsers, he has managed to create a PC emulator that runs in a browser. As a demonstration he has posted a link to a version of the Linux kernel running in such a scenario.

No April Foolery: The Portable C Compiler version 1.0 was released on April 1st! As with so many things BSD, this project proves that good code is timeless and can benefit from literally generations of review. It can build the majority of the BSD base systems (C++ code aside) and is undergoing continuous improvement.

Your company is ready to upgrade its custom applications from 32-bit to 64-bit. (Finally.) Here's 10 tips to help you make the transition as painless as possible.

The BSD licensed Portable C Compiler (PCC) is steadily on the road for a 1.0 release and is now able to compile a FreeBSD/amd64 CURRENT system with almost no changes. The current version of PCC has evolved from the original PCC developed at Bell Labs during the 1970s and has been maintained by Anders Magnusson and a small team of developers during the last decade. It has received more attention during the last few years, especially by OpenBSD and NetBSD people seeing it at as a viable option as a GCC replacement.

"Using a GPU for computational workloads is not a new concept. The first work in this area dates back to academic research in 2003, but it took the advent of unified shaders in the DX10 generation for GPU computing to be a plausible future. Around that time, Nvidia and ATI began releasing proprietary compute APIs for their graphics processors, and a number of companies were working on tools to leverage GPUs and other alternative architectures. The landscape back then was incredibly fragmented and almost every option required a proprietary solution - either software, hardware or both. Some of the engineers at Apple looked at the situation and decided that GPU computing had potential - but they wanted a standard API that would let them write code and run on many different hardware platforms. It was clear that Microsoft would eventually create one for Windows (ultimately DirectCompute), but what about Linux, and OS X? Thus an internal project was born, that would eventually become OpenCL."

"CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports."