General Development Archive

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.

"This set of tutorials aims to take you through programming a simple UNIX-clone operating system for the x86 architecture. The tutorial uses C as the language of choice, with liberally mixed in bits of assembler. The aim is to talk you through the design and implementation decisions in making an operating system. The OS we make is monolithic in design (drivers are loaded through kernel-mode modules as opposed to user-mode programs), as this is simpler."

"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."

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner outlines the 12 most common programming mistakes, and how to avoid them. "Certain programming practices send the majority of developers reaching for their hair upon opening a file that has been exhibiting too much 'character'. Spend some time in a bar near any tech company, and you'll hear the howls: Why did the programmer use that antiquated structure? Where was the mechanism for defending against attacks from the Web? Wasn't any thought given to what a noob would do with the program?" Wayner writes. From playing it fast and loose, to delegating too much to frameworks, to relying too heavily on magic boxes, to overdetermining the user experience - each programming pitfall is accompanied by its opposing pair, lending further proof that "programming may in fact be transforming into an art, one that requires a skilled hand and a creative mind to achieve a happy medium between problematic extremes".

"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."

InfoWorld offers a look back at the first decade of agile programming. Forged in February 2001 when a group of developers convened in Utah to find an alternative to documentation-driven, 'heavyweight' software development practices, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development sought to promote processes that accommodate changing requirements, collaboration with customers, and delivery of software in short iterations. Fast-forward a decade, and agile software development is becoming increasingly commonplace, with software firms adopting agile offshoots such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban - a trend some see benefiting software development overall

LLVM 2.8 has been released. The release notes describe this new, ehm, release in greater detail, so head on over and give it a read.

Anyone who did not see this one coming after Microsoft's patent deal with HTC and Apple's meticulousness in avoiding Windows Mobile in its suit against HTC hasn't been paying attention. Microsoft has filed a patent complaint with the US International Trade Commission, as well as a patent lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola over its Android-based devices.

Python programmers shouldn't get too smug. While many people agree that Python is designed in a way that makes it a highly readable language, there can still be problems with legacy, untested Python code too. Porting legacy Perl to Python can be a daunting task. In this article, learn some of the theory behind dealing with legacy code, including what not to do.

C++ is usually synonymous with object-oriented programming (OOP), and further replenished in no small measure by popular technical literature. This article tries something different - functional programming with C++ using the open source FC++ library from Yannis Smaragdakis and Brian McNamara. Learn how you can use FC++ to implement basic functional programming.

Real-Time apps have been popularized by social-notification tools like Twitter and Friendfeed. With a Real-Time web app you can get website information as soon as it's published. Learn techniques that allow you to create responsive, continually updated web applications that conserve server resources while providing a slick user experience using jQuery, XMPP and PHP.

Today's commercial-grade programming languages - C++ and Java, in particular - are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon.

In this five-part series, you will take a closer look at several new technologies that are part of HTML5, that can have a huge impact on mobile Web application development. Part 1: Combine HTML5, geolocation APIs, and Web services to create mobile mashups. Part 2: Unlock local storage for mobile Web applications with HTML5. Part 3: Make mobile Web applications work offline with HTML5. Part 4: Using Web Workers to speed up your mobile Web applications. Part 5: Develop new visual UI features in HTML 5.

"For three years son Ben, and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC. Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming." Looking beyond the immediate fear-inducing acronym BASIC, this article delves deeply into what it means to simply be in control--via a basic understanding of under the hood--of your own computer, and how our whiz-bang world of technology today is failing to bestow this understanding on this generation of would-be hackers.