General Development Archive

Recursion is a tool not often used by imperative language developers, because it is thought to be slow and to waste space, but as the author demonstrates, there are several techniques that can be used to minimize or eliminate these problems. He introduces the concept of recursion and tackle recursive programming patterns, examining how they can be used to write provably correct programs.

Analysts of the software industry often point out that the majority of software written in the world is not commercially released, but used in-house. Computerworld has an interesting profile of a well-known company that writes virtually all of its software in-house. It discusses some of the challenges they face, the temptations to use more off-the-shelf software, and some available apps and tools that they do use, that have proved to be useful.

Danny Thorpe is the chief scientist at Borland Software, and was part of the original team that developed Delphi. In this interview Thorpe talks about Delphi, Kylix, and the future of working with the Mono project.

Capacity planning is an important part of the work that Systems Administrators perform on a regular basis. The knowledge about the current utilization levels becomes indispensable to predict when the next hardware upgrade will be needed. Moodss (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic SpreadSheet) is a free tool for collecting data from different systems and making it readily available for analysis.

The second edition of 'Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change' explains how and why to use XP. But where to start? XP Explained uses the analogy of entering a swimming pool to describe how organizations get started with XP. There are toe dippers, racing divers, cannonballers, and all manner of variations in between. In this paper Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres characterize these styles.

Quick feedback. More testable code. Finding serious problems early. What's not to like? Michael Kelly pleads the case for unit testing.

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.