General Development Archive

Time for a New Installation Paradigm, Part 2

Eugenia Loli 2003-04-20 General Development 43 Comments

LinuxWorld takes a closer look at the technological considerations behind one of the biggest issues for software-installation: shared libraries. A similar interesting article, a guide to how and why to make incompatible versions of libraries and development tools install in parallel, can be found here.

C# is just Java? Only a Little Worse

Submitted by Deniz Kaan Çopur 2003-04-19 General Development 85 Comments

"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.

Learn More about C++

Eugenia Loli 2003-04-14 General Development 28 Comments

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

Rational Releases Development Powerpack

Submitted by Frank 2003-04-09 General Development 1 Comment

The new The Rational Developer Powerpack has been released, it includes XDE - Java Platform, XDE - .NET Platform, Rational Rose Enterprise Edition, Rational Rose RealTime, PurifyPlus, software evaluation guide, technical articles and whitepapers, valuable code snippets and reference applications, a handy quick-reference posters and much more. Also take a look at this interview with Rational Chief Scientist Grady Booch, who offers insights on the future of software development.

Download the Beta Version of Revolution 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2003-04-07 General Development 6 Comments

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.

J2EE, C# and Object Oriented Programming

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-31 General Development 1 Comment

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".

Eclipse 2.1 Released; Python 2.3, PHP 5 News

Submitted by Chris McKillop 2003-03-29 General Development 11 Comments

Eclipse 2.1 was released today. For a list of what is new checkout here. In other developer news, OnLamp posted an article explaining what's new in Python 2.3. Info on PHP 5 can be found from here.

Generalized Callbacks: C++ and C#

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-23 General Development 22 Comments

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

Kondra Embeddable Runtime Environment and SDK Released

Submitted by David Vogt 2003-03-13 General Development 6 Comments

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.

Tech Soup: Interesting InformIT Articles

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-10 General Development 2 Comments

InformIT published a number of interesting tech articles (free reg. required). "PostgreSQL SQL Syntax and Use", "Why Itanium Processors? Benefits of the New Processor Family", "Java Test Environment Construction and Tuning", "Daily Java Tips from Steve Potts and Alex Pestrikov", "Branching, Looping, and Creating Methods in JSP", ".NET Programming: What Is .NET?", "Working with .NET Windows Forms", "Programming in PerlNET: First Steps".

Interview with Autopackage’s Project Leader

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-06 General Development 19 Comments

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.

Optimizing GCC Itself

Submitted by Yama 2003-03-02 General Development 31 Comments

"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.

REAL Software Releases REALbasic 5 for Macintosh

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-24 General Development 28 Comments

Real Software announces the availability of REALbasic 5 for Macintosh. This new version builds smaller applications, improves support for Jaguar (including drawers, brushed-metal windows and toolbars), adds new Internet capabilities, better Unicode support and new server development option.

GCC Begins to Match ICC on the Pentium 4

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-23 General Development 20 Comments

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.

Memory Hierarchy in Cache-Based Systems

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-17 General Development No Comments

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.

GCC Myths and Facts

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-16 General Development 13 Comments

"Since my good old Pentium 166 days, I've liked to search for the best optimizations possible so programs can take the maximum advantage of hardware/CPU cycles. If I have a nice piece of hardware, why not run it at its full power, using every little feature? Shouldn't we all try to get the best results from the money invested in our machines?" Read the article at FreshMeat.

Open Watcom C/C++ and Fortran 1.0 Goes Golden

Submitted by Andrew 2003-02-13 General Development 23 Comments

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 1.2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-12 General Development 11 Comments

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.

Fair Queuing Disk Schedulers

Submitted by Jeremy Andrews 2003-02-12 General Development 3 Comments

Following the recent release of an anticipatory IO scheduler, Andrea Arcangeli started a lengthy thread in which he proposed an SFQ (Stochastic Fair Queuing) disk scheduler. The idea was picked up by Jens Axboe who had evidently worked on a similar idea earlier. Jens quickly posted two different disk schedulers utilizing "fair queuing" algorithms, more commonly used in handling network traffic. Read the full story at KernelTrap.

Eclipse IDE Platform Released New Stable Build: M5

Submitted by Deniz Kaan Çopur 2003-02-11 General Development 25 Comments

Eclipse is free universal IDE platform. It is written in Java and available on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Solaris, and other Java enabled platforms. It comes with a default support for Java, but plugins for other languages such as C, C++, Pascal, C# etc. can be downloaded from here.