General Development Archive

GCC 4.2.1 has been released, the last release of the GNU Compiler Collection under the GPL v2. "GCC 4.2.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.0 relative to previous GCC releases. GCC 4.2.1 will be the last release of GCC covered by version 2 of the GNU General Public License. All future releases will be released under GPL version 3."

Jeroen van der Zijp, the author of Fox Toolkit, has kindly given kerkythea.net an interview. The Fox Toolkit is a platform independent GUI that has matured over the last years to become one of the fastest and well structured APIs.

Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has published on his blog an interesting status report for Python 3.0 ('Python 3000'), the upcoming major revision to the language scheduled for mid-2008. He discusses the rationale for redesigning the language, syntax changes, new features and libraries and inter-compatibility issues.

This article demonstrates the art of using powerful Eclipse wizardtry that that automates the creation of classes, interfaces, projects, other resources. Eclipse wizards are a great way to define repeatable templates for file types when the built-in template functionality won't suffice. After working through the information, you will be able to implement your own speed wizards in Eclipse to create enhanced functionality very quickly.

During the last LLVM developers'meeting, several Apple engineers made some presentations about their work on different aspects of LLVM. One of them explains the work on "clang", a new C front-end, which will also support C++ and Objective C. Chris Lattner also discussed the use of LLVM in Leopard Open GL. Slides and videos available. Additionally, LLVM 2.0 was released recently.

"A startup in Alameda, Calif. plans to release a kind of holy software grail the third or fourth week of June. Lina said its dual-licensed Lina virtual Linux machine will run more or less normal Linux applications under Windows, Mac, or Linux, with a look and feel native to each."

GCC 4.2 has been released. The biggest feature in this release is OpenMP support in C, C++ and Fortran. See the changes page for more details.

To celebrate the 1000th article of the magazine Obligement, Carl Sassenrath returns through this long interview on its origins at Amiga Inc. in the 1980's (Manager of AmigaOS and Amiga CDTV system development, among others), the bankruptcy of Commodore, its passages at Apple Computer and Viscorp, Amiga NG, or on its new revolutionary language REBOL. A classic name in the Silicon Valley!

"The recently released 1.0.106 version of Libferris includes initial support for mounting Web photo services as a filesystem. This means that sites such as 23hq.com and flickr.com can be seen as filesystems, which allows users to upload digital pictures easily by using the cp(1) or ferriscp(1) tool with a destination of 23hq://username/upload."

This article describes techniques you can use to create new levels of usefulness in your dynamically generated charts with Perl and GD. Cook up some automatically generated graphs for your organizational meetings or live enterprise directory data. Annotate the charts with readable text that delivers more information than the standard pie chart. Using the power of GD and Perl, you can link various data and images together to create sophisticated charts that will help bring visual interest to your applications.

There is an interesting but rarely mentioned technique in a C++ context: signature-based polymorphism, a more permissive variation of subtype polymorphism, usually called duck typing. Two objects having nothing in common can share an implicit interface and be commonly manipulated by such an interface with no inheritance involved. Part I and Part II. Also, making use of SIMD units such as MMX, SSE, or AltiVec is usually a tradeoff of portability for speed. Recent versions of GCC include an extension that allows you to write vector code without sacrificing portability. Take a look at how to use it.

"What makes programming languages are suitable or unsuitable as introductory languages? Which languages are better learnt first and at which order? And why what the masses think is the most suitable introductory programming language is not in fact that. This paper examines several approaches to which programming language is the best, and afterwards gives several useful relations for which languages should come first. Finally it gives a final verdict, defends it and then gives some other good food for thought."

The POWER5 processor is a 64-bit workhorse used in a variety of settings. Starting with this introduction to assembly language concepts and the PowerPC instruction set, this series of articles introduces assembly language in general and specifically for the POWER5. Read more for links to all the parts in the series.

"This article walks through the steps for using the Graphical Editing Framework. Rather than finishing each step in its entirety, we'll use a subset of your application's model and get that working first. For example, we might initially ignore connections or focus on just a subset of the types of graphical elements in your application. Next, learn what other technologies are available to add graphical editing to your applications. In the past, stand-alone GEF used to be the only option for graphical editing in Eclipse, but this has changed as Eclipse has evolved."