General Development Archive

We are pleased to announce a new stable release of Valgrind, version 2.2.0.

The second article of this two-part series explores more advanced lex/yacc development and introduces basic troubleshooting techniques. See e-mail headers parsed before your very eyes! Marvel at cryptic error messages! See a computer actually compute something!

The ccache tool improves the build performance by caching the incorporation of header files into source files and therefore speeds the build time by reducing the time required to add in header files with each compilation stage. In this article, learn how to build and install ccache, how to use it with your existing environment, and how to improve the build times in group development projects.

Lex and yacc are tools to automatically build C code suitable for parsing things in simple languages. These tools are most often used for parts of compilers or interpreters, or for reading configuration files. In the first of two articles, Peter Seebach explains what lex and yacc actually do and shows how to use them for simple tasks.

Although most people use PHP primarily as a Web development scripting system, it possesses all the characteristics of a proper general-purpose language that can be useful in a variety of other environments. In this article, Marco Tabini illustrates how it's possible to use the command-line version of PHP to perform complex shell operations, such as manipulating data files, reading and parsing remote XML documents and scheduling important tasks through cron.

Issues regarding UNIX software package managment have brought us many usable, yet complicated package management tools, such as those seen in RedHat Linux, Solaris, BSD systems and Mac OS X. While being very useful at their tasks, they bring unnecessary complexity of the management software used, as well as dependency on central package database.

This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.

Learn how to use C++ code to create basic animated graphics in this chapter from "Beginning Game Programming" by Michael Morrison.

PHP 5.0.1 is a maintenance release which adds many non-critical bugfixes and new Unix and Windows installation documentation which is auto-generated from the PHP Manual. Gambas 0.97 is now compiled with gcc 3.4. A new class, Settings, allows you to manage configuration files. The divide operator now behaves exactly as in other BASIC languages; it returns the whole floating point result, and not the integer part only. FOX 1.2.9 back-ports an FXTopWindow placement patch and fixes a bug in inquireDNDTypes(). FOX 1.3.8 (development) adds an FXSplashWindow class, an FXMemMap class for memory mapped files, and some missing APIs to FXFileSelector and FXFileDialog.

In September, 2003, Ecma Technical Committee TC39 created Task Group 5 (TG5) to create a standard for the language C++/CLI, based on a submission from Microsoft. When TG5 has completed this specification, it will be submitted to the Ecma General Assembly (GA) for consideration as an Ecma standard. Once it has been adopted as such, the specification will be submitted to ISO/IEC JTC 1 via the latter's Fast-Track process.

Absoft Corporation has announced immediate availability of its new high performance Pro Fortran tool kit version 9.0 for Macintosh OS X. Absoft’s Pro Fortran Compiler Suite is the most complete Macintosh Fortran tool kit available from any vendor and includes: Fortran 95 and C/C++ compilers, a powerful Integrated Development Environment, the market-leading Fx2™ Debugger, and free graphics libraries.

This is an interview of Ben Collins-Sussman (of Subversion fame) conducted by Shlomi Fish. The next major version of Subversion, 1.1.0, is scheduled to be release on September.

I first started programming C in high school. Most of what I learned was from a book I bought myself. The class itself wasn't very good. The book I had on C didn't teach me everything a beginning programmer needs to know.

Get an introduction to DParser, a simple but powerful tool for parsing. Then learn about DParser for Python, which gives Python programmers a seamless interface to DParser, and see how it compares to other parsers covered in previous installments. In a manner similar to Spark or PLY, grammar rules are input to DParser using Python function documentation strings.