General Development Archive

"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.

"I am pleased to report that the GCC Steering Committee and the FSF have approved the use of C++ in GCC itself. Of course, there's no reason for us to use C++ features just because we can. The goal is a better compiler for users, not a C++ code base for its own sake. Before we start to actually use C++, we need to determine a set of coding standards that will apply to use of C++ within GCC."

"Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet. For this guest post, we asked Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, to weigh in on the topic."

I think it's about time we got an Adobe category. Apple recently made public an API to allow OS X software access to hardware H.264 acceleration (albeit such acceleration is only available on chipsets since the Nvidia 9400M--early 2008) and Adobe have already baked this in to a beta preview of Flash 10.1 "Gala"! Update: Steve Jobs himself weighs in on Flash (via Engadget): "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

"Changes from GCC 4.4, which was released almost one year ago, include the use of the MPC library to evaluate complex arithmetic at compile time, C++0x improvements, automatic parallelization as part of Graphite, support for new ARM processors, Intel Atom optimizations and tuning support, and AMD Orochi optimizations too." See also the GCC 4.5 changelog.

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

This article coveres some of the new HTML 5 capabilities of modern browsers including powerful HTML 5 features such as multi-threading, geolocation, embedded databases, and embedded video. Learn how to use them in your applications.

When you spend a lot of time looking at different Linux distributions you get used to reading the phrase, "... is a general purpose operating system with a focus toward..." Sometimes it's a focus toward ease of use, sometimes it's a focus toward improved package management, other times it's security. There are a lot of general purpose Linux distributions out there, which is good, but one thing I love about Linux is its ability to fill a niche. For instance, it would be difficult for me to get through a work week without having tools such as GParted Live, for partition management; Knoppix, for hardware detection; and Clonezilla, for saving and restoring disk images. This past week I had a chance to talk with Steven Shiau, one of the developers behind Clonezilla.

"The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation, brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation."

Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that takes a pretty radical departure from current IDEs. While most IDEs, such as Eclipse are file-based, Code Bubbles is based on fragments. The system appears to support reading and editing code with fragments, multi-tasking, annotating and sharing, and debugging with bubbles. There's a website with video too.

Dust off your he's-a-Microsoft-fanboy complaints, people, because here's yet another story praising the Redmond software giant (sorry). In case you were wondering what the Xbox Live integration on Windows Phone 7 Series (inhale, signified by a comma), meant, then Eric Rudder (what's in a name), Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Technical Strategy, has the answer for you - and it's pretty impressive.

Less than four months after its unveiling at an early, experimental stage, Google Go looks promising to developers who say it offers significant improvements over other programming languages.

"The dragonegg GCC plugin can host itself! Dragonegg lets you use the LLVM optimizers with GCC-4.5, much like llvm-gcc, but unlike llvm-gcc does not involve modifying GCC, thanks to the new GCC plugin infrastructure (currently one small patch is required). We built all of GCC-4.5, LLVM and dragonegg with dragonegg, then used the resulting binaries to build them all again. Why? Because we love to build! And because this was a great way of checking that nothing was miscompiled. The final dragonegg plugin was fully functional, successfully passing the entire dragonegg test suite."

IPfaces is a client-server framework for iPhone (and presumably other platforms soon) that enables developers to create a server-side app using their familiar tools then connect to a generic client that's already downloadable in the App Store. It's dual license, with a GPL Open Source version for free projects and a commercial version for for-profit apps. Unlike other frameworks that allow you to create an iPhone app using non Objective-C tools, this one gives you a real client, not just a wrapper for a web app.