General Development Archive

Power consumption, supply voltage, junction temperature, system cooling requirements, and processor clock rate are all physically and thermodynamically related. By understanding the relationships, system cost and complexity trade-offs, and resource requirements, system designers can strike a better balance between requirements. See how you can incorporate emergent cooling and adaptive power control methods into embedded system designs.

You might have heard of the Rexx scripting language from its role as the dominate scripting language on mainframes, OS/2, and the AmigaOS.

The GNU project and the GCC developers have announced the release of GCC 3.4.4. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 3.4.3 relative to previous releases of GCC.

Catching and Throwing in C++ can be tricky, but this chapter will help you to know when and how to use these functions effectively, as well as when you shouldn't be using them.

The sixth major release of the LLVM compiler infrastructure was released today by the University of Illinois CS department. LLVM provides a comprehensive set of libraries and tools for building optimizing compilers with bytecode, JIT, and static compilation. For more information on LLVM, please visit the LLVM web site.

After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready. With the new compiler, its authors believe they are ready to become a larger open source development platform. In the MS-DOS world, Pascal was one of the major programming languages and is by means of Borland Delphi an important programming language in the Windows world. In the open source world, Free Pascal is the leading Pascal compiler and while open source is a bit biased using the C language, the Pascal language has a lot to offer to open source programmers.

Want to keep your build file lean, mean, and totally maintainable? Marcus Zarra tells you why Jakarta's Ant is a relatively easy-to-use way to build your projects (and how to avoid its common pitfalls).

"Build a Dashboard Widget", "Building Cocoa-Java Apps with Eclipse", "Generic Java Types, Part 2" and "Creating a Windows DLL with Visual Basic". Enjoy the weekend reading.

Fortress is a new language for from a team that includes Guy Steele, Common Lisp guru and contributor of Java. Language is introduced as the "next Fortran". Fortress language spec and an early overview.

Ada - a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications - and embedded systems in particular - is set to get some extensions in its next incarnation Ada 2006. There is a talk here, highlighting the most important changes (eg. cyclic type structures, Java-like interfaces, standardization of the Ravenscar tasking profile, container libraries, etc.). Updated drafts of the standard are available here. For general information about Ada there is a Wikibook Programming:Ada.

The topic of polymorphism is given mystical status in some programming texts and is ignored in others, but it's a simple, useful concept that the C++ language supports. Find out all about it in this sample chapter by Stephen Dewhurst.

Boo celebrates its 0.5.3 release today, featuring a host of bug fixes and features. Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility. It features ASP.NET support and dynamic duck-typing. For SharpDevelop users, BooBinding has been updated to work with the latest SharpDevelop release. MonoDevelop users will be interested to know that a Boo Addin is available in SVN.

The code examples in these tutorials are in Python and C, but translate well to other languages. Part 1 covers the basics, such as an echo server and client, which connect over TCP/IP, fundamental network, layer, and protocol concepts. Part 2 is an intermediate level tutorial that demonstrates how to write UDP sockets applications.

Transactional NTFS, coming in Longhorn, allows developers to group filesystem operations into transactions, and make those changes atomically. Changes made by transactions are isolated from each other, so that one transaction can 'see' a different set of files compared to another transaction. Transactions can also be used to view a frozen version of a file, fixed at a point in time, while another task updates the same file.