General Development Archive

"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 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

File systems need to change. Current file systems are horribly out-of-touch with the realities of what users need to effectively find, organize, and modify their vast quantities of files. Unfortunately, no major consumer OS vendor (Microsoft, Apple, various Linux distos, etc.) has had the foresight, the will, and most of all, the cajones to implement anything more elaborate than a small departure from the standard hierarchical name-space which we all grew up on and should rightfully deplore. Worst of all, the best suggestions for changing the current entrenched standard are incredibly toothless, incredibly feeble.

Some programmers see the advantage of combining Python and Objective-C in the same environment, believing that a bridge between the two languages provides tremendous power and advantages to either language. For the Objective-C developer, access to Python provides a rapid application-development solution that's far more efficient than one requiring a compiler. For the Python developer, transparent access to Objective-C would allow the developer's scripts to leverage the full power and elegance of the MacOSX environment. In this article, Bill Bumgarner shows you how to bring these worlds together.

REBOL Technologies today announced its plan to expand development and support for the Apple Macintosh OS X operating system. Beginning with OS X Jaguar (version 10.2), REBOL will port its entire line of products, including View and Pro products as well as Command, SDK (Software Developers Toolkit) and IOS (X Internet Operating System).

Want to take advantage of multithreading and side-step its associated obstacles? Boudewijn Rempt uses the PyQt toolkit to help you work around the challenges of programming a multithreaded GUI in Python .

The bug fix version Bochs 2.0.2 has been released. This release is the last planned bugfix release for the 2.0.x series. On other dev news, multiplatform GUI toolkit wxWindows 2.4.0 was recently released.

The OpenPKG project released version 1.2 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 1.2 provides 361 selected packages which include proven versions of popular Unix software -- all carefully packaged for easy deployment on the six officially supported Unix platforms FreeBSD 4.7 and 5.0, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 and 3.0, and Sun Solaris 8 and 9.

"When old programmers like me (I'm 41) get together we talk about the applications from the old days. What happens to these beauties?" Read the editorial at ZDNews.

There has been a growing movement in the computer industry as of late towards exploration of more database-like filesystem paradigms - the reason being that today's filesystems are primitive, scattered, and cannot efficiently manage the immense amount of information that computer users have to work with on a regular basis every day.