General Development Archive

What is C99? Who needs it? Is it available yet? The author discusses the 1999 revision of the ISO C standard, with a focus on the availability of new features on Linux and BSD systems.

Have you ever been using an Open Source application and noticed something horribly wrong? I have and as a skilled maintenance programmer it really tickles my fix-it bone. I know I could fix it if I wanted to but it's just so much effort. Usually it's only when a bug really annoys the hell out of me that I'll even go to the trouble of downloading the source code (or even finding out where I can download the source code from). In the rare moments that I have taken on the feat of fixing someone else's code I've found myself exercising my most mad maintenance programmer skills and I decided to make a little list.

March's LinuxGazette.net and 100th issue includes interesting articles like "Programmer's Toolkit: Profiling programs using gprof", "Python Generator Tricks" and "Fvwm and Session Management".

Zaval's dual licensed LwVCL provides the same API solution for both Java (J2SE & J2ME) and .NET (.NET & Mono). This means that the same API, the same components set, the same functionality, and at last the same look and feel work on both architectures.

This document is the result of various discussions with Mono and MonoDevelop users on their needs to build, package and distribute their software by using Mono Develop. Elsewhere, Eclipse 3.0 M8 has been released. It features many fixes, improvements and new features inlcuding a minor UI facelift.

Those following the evolution of the Reiser4 filesystem will be interested in learning that it has become "fairly stable for average users", so much so that Namesys is soon planning to push patches to 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton. Once the two remaining known bugs are fixed, the warnings against using reiser4 on a production system will likely be removed, KernelTrap reports.

This article shows how to handle pointers to dynamically allocated memory when programming in C++.

Do you like playing detective and solving mysteries? Performance problems come in many guises, giving you ample opportunity to indulge your clue-hunting proclivities to identify and resolve them. The main man behind the MegaJogos multi-player game site and a member of the Java Games community, recently altered the application behind the site to use the NIO package to enhance its scalability.

Buffer overflows are currently the most common cause of security flaws in applications. Discover the techniques that professionals use to thwart this problem in this article by John Mueller.

Programming must change -- but how? At a reunion of coding pioneers, answers abound.

"Mono as it currently stands has serious problems, including strategic and intellectual property concerns. Java as provided by Sun is not open source or GPL-compatible and thus a nonstarter. Many strong proprietary companies such as Microsoft are moving full speed ahead on high-level managed language platforms. Can open source compete, or is it too unable to make hard decisions?" Read Havoc Pennington's article about the future platforms of OSS.

This release of Subversion fixes about 25 small bugs discovered during the six-week code freeze for 1.0.

The article at Perl.com describes the design and implmementation of svk, a distributed version control system built on top of Subversion.

This article introduces the Runtime Spy, one of Core Tools available from Eclipse.org. The Runtime Spy is a perspective and set of views specifically designed to help you find and diagnose plug-in startup performance problems. It's considered one of best tools for understanding and diagnosing startup performance problems related to plug-in activation.