General Development Archive

Conquest is a new filesystem which uses memory to store all metadata, small files (currently based on a size threshold), executables, and shared libraries, leaving only the content of large files on disk.

Andrei Alexandrescu discusses smart pointers, from their simplest aspects to their most complex ones and from the most obvious errors in implementing them to the subtlest ones -- some of which also happen to be the most gruesome. Also, learn how to throw an exception, how to associate handlers, or catch clauses, with a set of program statements using a try block, and how exceptions are handled by catch clauses, exception specifications, and design considerations for programs that use exceptions.

"C# and Java are both nice languages. They reach similar goals through similar means, although C# adds some syntactical touches to Java, such as the foreach keyword and a more pleasant extends/implements construct. Unfortunately, the improvements are outweighed by the instances of regression. In this article, I'll compare the languages, while trying to avoid dipping to the JVM and CLR level." Read the article at Builder.com. Update: A similar comparison article, about security.

InformIT has a series of articles about C++, including a long introduction to C++ for new programmers and a Templates and Inheritance interaction article.

Runtime Revolution released their first beta of their impressive RAD tool for MacOS/X/Windows/Unix/Linux, Revolution 2.0, which includes a number of new features.

Three new interesting InformIT developer articles posted: "J2EE Performance Tuning, Part 2" (Part I here), "C# Design Patterns: The Decorator Pattern" (Part 4) and "Object-Oriented Frameworks for Network Programming".

Dr. Dobb's Journal issue of March 2003 features an article comparing C++'s libsigc++ class library to C#'s delegate feature.

Kondra Systems, just released a powerful virtual machine and C runtime combination that offers pre-emptive threads, virtual filesystem, floating point emulation, dynamic linker/loader, and true binary compatibility across all platforms in a 64k package.

NewsForge hosts an interview with Autopackage's project leader Mike Hearn. The idea around Autopackage is to come up with a single software packaging/installation system that will work across all major Linux distributions, and resolve dependencies, too, so that neither developers nor users need to worry about distribution compatibility issues. OSNews hosted recently a feature article about the project.

"I have a Pentium 3 866MHZ CPU. After reading the freshmeat article on optimizing GCC a few days ago, it got me thinking. So I posed the following question: How much faster would gcc compile the kernel if gcc itself was optimized?" Read the rest at Linux Gazette.

As reported by KernelTrap, CVS version of the yet to be released GCC 3.4 is reaching parity with ICC on floating point performance according to SPECFP2000. SPECINT still isn't as good however when compared to ICC.

This article at InformIT (free reg. req.) will help the reader understand the architecture of modern microprocessors by introducing and explaining the most common terminology and addressing some of the performance related aspects. Written for programmers and people who have a general interest in microprocessors, this article presents introductory information on caches and is designed to provide understanding on how modern microprocessors work and how a cache design impacts performance.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that the Open Watcom 1.0 has been released and is now available for download from the OpenWatcom.org website and for purchase on CD from SciTech's website. Read more for the press release.

XFS is a high-performance journaling file system. It provides quick recovery after a crash, fast transactions, high scalability, and excellent bandwidth. This new release adds support for multiple filesystem block sizes and striped logs, plus plenty of bugfixes. SGI also provides an OS installer for Red Hat users who would like to use XFS instead.