General Development Archive

Version control systems are a tool close to any programmer's heart and a lot has been made of advancements in Subversion, but there is another version control system out there that completely redefines the boundaries of how such a system should work. Tom Lord is the author of the Arch Revision Control System. OSDir interviews Tom on the story behind Arch and just how different it is from what you're likely using today.

This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages.

Cameron and Tracey Hughes explore how to use object streaming with the STL containers by combining inserters, extractors, and manipulators with stream iterators. Two more programming articles follow:

Subversion is a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. This is a minor bugfix release.

Absoft Corporation has announced the availability of Visual Numerics’ IMSL Fortran Numerical Library version 5.0 bundled with its new high performance Pro Fortran compiler suite version 9.0 for Windows which was also announced today, along with MATFOR 3.

Nemerle is a hybrid (functional, object-oriented and imperative) programming language for the .NET platform. The key features of the language include C#-like syntax, easy access to functional, object-oriented, and imperative features, powerful code-generating macros, variants, pattern matching, static and on-demand dynamic typing, and type inference. This version makes the Nemerle language full CLS consumer and producer. A number of non-CLS features are also in place, for C# compatibility, but CLSCompliant attribute checking is not yet supported. Any lack in CLS compliance is a bug now.

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.