Development

The GCC 4.0 Release Series

Release Series 4.0 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, was announced this week.

GCC 4.0 features a long list of changes. This release includes the merge of the Tree SSA (Static Single Assignment) optimization framework branch into the mainline code (LWN covered Tree SSA one year ago). "This merge has brought in a completely new optimization framework based on a higher level intermediate representation than the existing RTL representation." This should result in improved performance.

Also, GCC 4.0 adds Swing Modulo Scheduling: "SMS is intended to schedule instructions of loops rather than the traditional scheduler (in GCC) that does not give a special handling for loops." SMS is optionally activated with the -fmodulo-sched switch.

Highlights of the language specific improvements include:

• The C Family
  • Addition of a new sentinel attribute for warning about non Null-terminated functions.
  • Aliases to undefined symbols now cause errors.
  • An error is generated when the address of a register variable is taken.
• C and Objective-C
  • New warnings enforce more strict aliasing.
  • Several deprecated extensions have been removed.
  • The fwritable-strings option has been removed.
  • The #pragma pack() semantics have been made similar to those used by other compilers.
  • An error is generated when an array with an incomplete element type is encountered.
• C++
  • Performance has been improved when compiling without optimizations.
  • ELF visibility attributes can now be applied to a class type, easing cross-platform project development.
  • The new -fvisibility-inlines-hidden option can hide exported symbols to improve binary load times.
  • The G++ minimum and maximum operators have been deprecated.
  • Several modifications to the handling of friends of classes have been added.
• Java
  • Several naming conflicts with external tools have been resolved.
  • The -findirect-dispatch argument now produces code that adheres to the binary compatibility rules of the Java Language Specification.
  • libgcj now supports using GCJ as a Just In Time (JIT) compiler.
  • Numerous improvements have been added to the class library.
• Fortran
  • The GNU Fortran 77 front end has been replaced by the newer GNU Fortran 95.
• Ada
  • Ada support has been extended to more platforms.
  • New Ada 2005 features have been added.
• Runtime Library
  • The Runtime Library has been optimized, new features have been added.

Target-specific improvements have been added to the AMD64, IA-64, MIPS, S/390 and zSeries, SPARC and NetWare platforms.

Support has been declared obsolete for the Intel i860, Ubicom IP2022, National Semiconductor NS32K, SPARClite, and OpenBSD 32-bit SPARC platforms

The build status document shows the list of platforms that the new release has been successfully tested on. More information on this and upcoming releases is available on the GCC Wiki.

Thanks should go to the long list of GCC contributors, GCC continues to be one of the most important cornerstones of Linux kernel and open source application development.

It may be interesting to follow the comment thread on the original LWN announcement.

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System Applications

Backup Software

Bacula Version 1.36.3

Version 1.36.3 of Bacula, a system backup utility, is available. See the release notes for details.

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Database Software

PostgreSQL Weekly News

The April 24, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL database information and resources.

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Printing

ESP Ghostscript 8.15rc3

Version 8.15rc3 of ESP Ghostscript has been announced. "ESP Ghostscript 8.15rc3 is the third release candidate based on GPL Ghostscript 8.15 and includes an enhanced configure script, the CUPS raster driver, many GPL drivers, support for dynamically loaded drivers (currently implemented for the X11 driver), and several GPL Ghostscript bug fixes. The new release also fixes all of the reported STRs from ESP Ghostscript 7.07.x."

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Web Site Development

CGI Calendar 2.7 released (SourceForge)

Version 2.7 of CGI Calendar, a web site calendar application, has been announced. "This version of the calendar introduces multi-lingual capability. Delivered translations include English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, and Esperanto. If you're interested in providing an additional translation, please let me know. Additional translations will be released as they become available."

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Five 1.0 released!

Version 1.0 of Five is available. "The Five team is happy to release Five 1.0. Five is a Zope 2 product that allows you to integrate Zope 3 technologies into Zope 2, today. There are no big feature additions compared to Five 0.3, but does include significant bugfixes, along with some minor tweaks. We went directly to 1.0 as we feel that Five is production-ready software."

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MediaWiki 1.4.2 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.4.2 of MediaWiki has been announced. "MediaWiki 1.4.2 is a security and bug fix release for the 1.4 stable release series. A cross-site scripting injection vulnerability was discovered, which affects only MSIE clients and is only open if MediaWiki has been manually configured to run output through HTML Tidy ($wgUseTidy). Several other bugs are also fixed in 1.4.2."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

jamin 0.95.0 release

Release 0.95.0 of jamin, the JACK Audio Mastering interface, is out. "This is a maintenance update, fixing some problems in preparation for a future release 1. JAMin is a GPL-licensed, realtime mastering processor designed to bring out the detail in recorded music and provide a final layer of polish. Every effort has been made to ensure a clean, distortion-free signal path. All processing elements use linear-phase filtering to eliminate phase distortion."

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Data Visualization

PLplot Development Release 5.5.2 (SourceForge)

Development Release 5.5.2 of PLplot has been announced. "This announcement is for a routine development release of PLplot (Scientific graphics plotting library, supporting multiple languages), and represents the ongoing efforts of the community to improve the PLplot plotting package. Development releases represent a "work in progress", and we expect to provide installments in the 5.5.x series every few weeks. The next full release of PLplot will be 5.6.0."

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Desktop Environments

GARNOME 2.10.1 Released

Version 2.10.1 of GARNOME has been released. "Welcome to the "point 1" release, where we've tried to squash as many of the existing bugs as possible and bring everyone another high quality release that shows off the talents of the GNOME Desktop."

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GNOME Software Announcements

The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:

• Browser Bookmarks Menu 0.5 (Requires PyGTK 2.6)
• Epiphany 1.6.3 (bug fixes)
• Epiphany Extensions 1.6.3 (bug fixes)
• Evolution 2.3.1 (bug fixes and other improvements)
• Gyrus 0.3.2 (new features and bug fixes)
• Java-GNOME 2.11.1 (bug fixes and package restructuring)
• Pyphany 0.1.4 (Re-sync API with Epiphany)

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KDE Software Announcements

The following new KDE software has been announced this week:

• G System 0.5 beta (new features)
• KIOSK Admin Tool v1.0 (improvements and bug fixes)
• Knoda 0.7.4-test1 (new features)

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KDE CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The April 22, 2005 edition of the KDE CVS-Digest is online, here's the content summary: "KTTS can use new Hungarian mbrola voice. Kexi adds a new script editor and classes in Python bindings. Kopete sees start of MSN webcam support. Continued progress in Kicker, khtml, Wifi and many others."

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Electronics

GSpiceUI Version 0.7.01

Version 0.7.01 of GSpiceUI, a GUI frontend for the GNU-Cap and Ng-Spice circuit simulation engines, has been announced. Numerous enhancements have been added.

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QtDMM Version 0.8.3

Version 0.8.3 of QtDMM is out with support for Qt-3. "QtDMM is a DMM readout software including a configurable recorder."

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Games

XBGM# v0.8 Release (SourceForge)

Version 0.8 of XBGM# has been announced. "XBGM# is a free Xbox Game Manager. It allow you to send (extract) xdvdfs (xbox iso) directly to the xbox via ftp using a GUI. It is working on Linux and Win32 platforms and should work on Mac OS X. XBGM# can be used with various implementations of the CLI, including .NET, Mono, and DotGNU Portable.NET."

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GUI Packages

FLTK 1.1.x Weekly Snapshot r4296

Release 4296 of the FLTK 1.1.x Weekly Snapshot has been announced, it features bug fixes and other improvements.

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wxWidgets 2.6.0 has been released

Version 2.6.0 of wxWidgets, a cross-platform UI framework, is out. "This is the first official, stable release for a long time but we think the wait has been worth it." See the download page for change information.

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Interoperability

Wine Traffic

The April 22, 2005 edition of Wine Traffic is out with the latest Wine project news.

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Music Applications

Freecycle 0.21 alpha released

Version 0.21 alpha of Freecycle has been announced. "Freecycle is a beat slicer running on GNU/Linux platform, providing amplitude domain and frequency domain beat matching / zero crossing algorithms. It exports sliced audio chunks and generates a MIDI file which can be used to play the sliced loop. Freecycle also exports AKAI S5000/S6000/Z4/Z8 .AKP file to be used with your favorite sampler."

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Office Applications

GanttProject 1.11 (SourceForge)

Version 1.11 of GanttProject, a Gantt chart plotting application, is out. "This release adds a new major feature everybody has been waiting for: support for weekends. One may define weekends when creating new project; it is also possible to add weekends to existing projects. Two other main features of this release: improved horizontal scrolling of the chart (no more two-monthes jumps!) and upload of exported projects to FTP server."

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Web Browsers

Mozilla Cairo Vector Graphics Update (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine covers the movement of Mozilla graphics to Cairo. "Robert "roc" O'Callahan has posted an update on the work to move Mozilla's graphics infrastructure to Cairo. Formerly known as Xr or Xr/Xc, Cairo is a cross-platform open-source vector graphics library. According to roc, migrating to Cairo will "give us modern 2D graphics capabilities (such as filling, stroking and clipping to paths, general affine transforms, and ubiquitious support for alpha transparency)." Cairo can send its output to a number of different backends, making it suitable for producing graphics for both screen and print."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the April 18, 2005 mozilla.org staff meeting are online. "Issues discussed include Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.3, Mozilla Firefox 1.1, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1, the Volunteer Awards and the proposed CA certificate policy."

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The April 19-26, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is online with the latest Caml language articles.

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Java

Enterprise Streaming (O'ReillyNet)

Amir Shevat discusses Java I/O streams on O'Reilly. "The Java Message Service is a lynchpin of J2EE, but is in some ways more difficult and less flexible than more basic forms of communication, like the stream model of the java.io package. However, as Amir Shevat writes, the two are not mutually exclusive--you can write to JMS topics and queues with streams."

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Five Favorite Features from 5.0 (O'ReillyNet)

David Flanagan reviews Java 5.0 on O'Reilly. "A lot has been written about Java 5.0's great new features, leaving David Flanagan to focus on this review of five of his favorite new API features: the Callable and Future interfaces, new APIs for varargs and autoboxing, new ability interfaces, the @Override annotation, and MatchResult."

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Lisp

SBCL 0.9.0 released

Version 0.9.0 of Steel Bank Common Lisp is out. "This major release provides changes to GC hooks, performance improvements, better documentation, and many bug fixes."

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Perl

This Week in Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The April 12-19, 2005 edition of This Week in Perl 6 has been published. Take a look for the latest Perl 6 news.

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Python

Urwid 0.8.7 Released

Version 0.8.7 of Urwid, a curses-based UI library for Python, is out. "This release adds a number of new widget classes as well as feature enhancements for existing widget classes. It also comes with a new example program similar to the dialog(1) command."

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Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The April 25, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the latest Python language article links.

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Ruby

Ruby Weekly News

The April 24th, 2005 edition of the Ruby Weekly News has been posted. It is a summary of the ruby-talk mailing list.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The April 20, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out. Take a look for the latest Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The April 26, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with another round of Tcl/Tk articles and resources.

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XML

Making Old Things New Again (O'Reilly)

Uche Ogbuji discusses XML document creation APIs on O'Reilly. "There have been recent releases of two of the Python-XML projects in which I'm involved; 4Suite and Amara XML Toolkit. One common theme in both releases was marked improvements to the XML document creation APIs. These improvements are significant enough to discuss and compare to the other systems for XML output I have presented in this column."

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XVTV -- Voice-operated television! (IBM developerWorks)

Marc White and Jeff Paull build a voice activated remote control on IBM developerWorks. "For those of you who have always wanted to control your TV using only your voice, you are going to love the XVTV remote control system. With XVTV in your home you can do anything from change channels to program a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) using simple voice commands. XVTV controls external devices by using a multimodal browser, an XHTML + Voice (X+V) Web page, and a USB Universal Infrared Transmitter (USB-UIRT)."

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Forming Opinions (O'Reilly)

Micah Dubinko writes about web forms and XML on O'Reilly. "Recently, the W3C published a new Member Submission: Web Forms 2.0, or WF2, based on a numbering system where the 1.0 version is the forms chapter of HTML 4.01 plus some DOM interfaces, which I collectively call "classic forms". To be clear, the Submission process is designed to "to propose technology or other ideas for consideration by the Team" — that is, W3C staffers. Unlike documents on the Recommendation track, Submission status doesn't imply any future course for the W3C or any endorsement of the content."

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IDEs

FLDev 0.5.4 released

Version 0.5.4 of FLDev, a C++ IDE that works with FLTK, is available. Here are the changes: "I fixed a few bugs, e.g. the Transparency of the App Icon, the missing undo-feature in the menu, the window hiding after calling fluid, etc..."

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Wing IDE 2.0.3 Announced

Version 2.0.3 of Wing, an IDE for Python, is available. "This release adds new keyboard personality for OS X, debugging support for 64-bit Linux versions of Python, and editor performance improvements."

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Miscellaneous

Luban Programming Language Beta 1.2 Released

Version Beta 1.2 of Luban, a component-oriented scripting language, is available. "Based on feed back from increasing number of Luban users, we release Luban Beta 1.2 that major changes are for enhancement sof Luban command line interpreter interface. We thank Luban users for giving feed back."

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