General Development Archive

Jeremy White posted the CodeWeavers' Outlook for 2009, explaining what the group has been working fervently on the past eight months as well as plans for the coming months of 2009. CodeWeavers develops and sells CrossOver, an application based upon Wine that can run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, specifically certain games and office applications. They're also the leading corporate backer of the Wine Project. In the road map, White explains that the past eight months have been spent on unattractive, under-the-hood improvements to Wine, particularly "things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level." He goes on to say that DirectX 9 support is coming along nicely for the CrossOver Games project, and DirectX 10 is around the corner. The plans for the upcoming months include shipping CrossOver 8.0 for both Linux and Mac, which will include many improvements, the juiciest of which are centered around Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office, and Quicken 2009. Aside from adding more and better application support in Wine, the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul by the CodeWeavers team.

The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a "scripting" language with features that enable the programmer to create even complex multi-threaded applications. It mixes several different programming paradigms into an unique blend of constructs, overcoming the limitations and partialities of other languages. The objective of this brief article is to be very practical with code examples as well as step by step simple instructions. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

"The first public demonstration of OpenCL functionality was given by AMD at Siggraph Asia 2008. OpenCL is the new vendor-independent standard designed to extract high performance parallel computing out of GPUs, DSPs and multicore CPUs. Basically the idea is that you can write your core computational code in OpenCL and voila! - your code scales to whatever processors are available. OpenCL will greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization."

The Lua programming language is a small scripting language specifically designed to be embedded in other programs. Lua's C API allows exceptionally clean and simple code both to call Lua from C, and to call C from Lua. This allows developers who want a convenient runtime scripting language to easily implement the basic API elements needed by the scripting language, then use Lua code from their applications. This article introduces the Lua language as a possible tool for simplifying common development tasks, and discusses some of the reasons to embed a scripting language in the first place.

"Parallel computing is the use of multiple processors in order to solve a specific task. For quite a few decades now parallelism has been used in the domain of High Performance Computing (HPC) where large, difficult problems are split up into pieces which are solved and then recombined to form the answer. With the emergence of multiple cores per processor this has become more and more important for the everyday user and programmer. In this article I will explain some of the elementry concepts of parallel computing and point the reader to further points of information."

The concept of Namespaces provides a way to help avoid problems with multiple functions, classes, and constants of the same name being defined multiple times. PHP 5.3 borrows much of the syntax and design of Namespaces from other languages — most notably C++. However, it does deal with Namespaces in a somewhat unique way, which may cause problems for those familiar with Namespaces. This article takes a close look at PHP V5.3 namespaces, which is one of the most anticipated and the most debated feature in this release of PHP.