General Development Archive

Get a Taste of Bochs 2.0

Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.

Visual Studio .Net Enters Final Beta Phase

Microsoft Corp. last week announced the final beta of its Visual Studio .Net 2003 product -formerly known by the code name Everett- and released its .Net Compact Framework. New features include: Availability of .Net Compact Framework, Improved scalability with support for up to 32 processors, Improved performance, Support for new Web services specifications: WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments, 98 percent conformance with the International Organization for Standardization's C++ standard, Integration of Visual J#.

Intel Releases Version 7.0 Compiler Suite

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

Moving from Windows to Linux with Kylix 3

One of the great things about using tools and databases such as Borland Delphi 7 Studio and IBM DB2 Universal Database is that moving between platforms is only a matter of a few changes and a recompile. This article shows how to move a functional application from a Delphi 7 application running on Microsoft Windows to a Linux application using Borland Kylix 3. This article also goes over DB2 on Linux and minor source code changes.

Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide, Part 13

In the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Daniel Robbins shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4. In this conclusion to the AFIG series, Daniel continues his discussion of the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, or EVMS. He shows you how to use evmsn to take a new hard drive, partition it, and create LVM volumes on it. Along the way, he fills you in on important EVMS concepts that you'll find essential as you continue your exploration of this powerful technology.

Introducing ColorForth

Forth has been a recognized programming language since the 1970's. ColorForth is a redesign of this classic language for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler.

Review: Kylix 3 has Plenty of Programming Power

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

The /opt and /usr Issue Revisited

"I suppose it's a losing battle, but it's one worth fighting, anyway. What makes me think of it is a thread I noticed on the freedesktop.org mailing list. In that thread, Andreas Pour, with whom I do not agree about much, defends obvious common sense against what over the last couple of years has been a growing onslaught. He's absolutely right, but that isn't always enough." Read it at LinuxAndMain.

UNIX To Windows Code Migration Guide

This document illustrates guidelines and best practices required to port existing UNIX applications to the Windows environment, which can potentially reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with a traditionally painful migration process. This guide covers planning and practical issues involved in migration or co-existence between UNIX and Windows and provides a review of the different ways in which such a migration can be done. Ideal for both UNIX programmers as well as Windows programmers, this is a valuable source of information for anyone looking to take advantage of Windows.