Product News

IncludeOS: A C++ Unikernel now free and open source

The IncludeOS unikernel prototype is now free and open source at GitHub. IncludeOS offers a portable way to run a compiled C++ service directly on virtual x86 hardware; either locally on your Mac or Windows machine with VirtualBox, or in large scale cloud environments running KVM.

#include <os> // literally.

From the home page:

Run your C++ code directly on virtual hardware

IncludeOS aims to be the thinnest, lightest possible layer, between your C++ code and virtual hardware. We provide a bootloader, standard libraries, lots (we hope) of modules, and the build- and deployment system. You provide the service.

IncludeOS is designed for KVM/Linux but previous versions have also been tested successfully on VirtualBox (which again runs on OS X Windows and Linux) and Bochs

It's a prototype -- be patient!

IncludeOS is not production ready -- but we're working hard to become so.

It's a research project

IncludeOS is the result of a research project at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science (hioa.no)

A paper titled IncludeOS: a resource efficient unikernel for cloud services, which presents the first prototype, will appear at IEEE CloudCom 2015

Contributors

IncludeOS was created by @alfred-bratterud, with lots of contributions from @fwsgonzo and others at the NETSYS group at HiOA.

Announcing the VS GDB Debugger extension--Marc Goodner

Annoucing a new tool in Visual Studio:

Announcing the VS GDB Debugger extension

by Marc Goodner

From the article:

Earlier this year I wrote a post on how you could debug C++ code on Linux from Visual Studio. It was a bit cumbersome, but it was doable. Today we are releasing the Visual Studio GDB Debugger extension preview. This will enable debugging remote Linux targets including IoT devices...

HPX version 0.9.11 released -- STE||AR Group

The STE||AR Group has released V0.9.11 of HPX -- A general purpose parallel C++ runtime system for applications of any scale.

HPX V0.9.11 Released

The newest version of HPX (V0.9.11) is now available for download! Please see here for the release notes.

HPX exposes an API fully conforming to the concurrency related parts of the C++11 and C++14 standards, extended and applied to distributed computing.

From the announcement:

  • In this release our team has focused on developing higher level C++ programming interfaces which simplify the use of HPX in applications and ensure their portability in terms of code and performance. We paid particular attention to align all of these changes with the existing C++ Standard or with the ongoing standardization work. Other major features include the introduction of executors and various policies which enable customizing the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of task and data placement.
  • This release consolidates many of the APIs exposed by HPX. We introduced a new uniform way of creating (local and remote) objects, we added distribution policies allowing to manage and customize data placement and migration, we unified the way various types of parallelism are made available to the user.

Cheerp 1.1 - C++ for the Web with fast startup times, dynamic memory and more speed!--Leaning Tech

If you want your C++ code to run on the web, there is Emscripten, but there is also Cheerp:

Cheerp 1.1 - C++ for the Web with fast startup times, dynamic memory and now, more speed!

by Leaning Technologies Ltd.

From the article:

Cheerp is a C++ compiler for the Web platform. Roughly a year ago we released Cheerp 1.0 with the promise of making C++ a first class language for the Web, with full access to DOM and HTML5 APIs (including WebGL) and great performance. At that time, we could only partially meet that promise.

With our early adopters starting to use Cheerp on real world, large scale applications, we were proud to see that Cheerp could indeed be used to seamlessly integrate C++ code into HTML5 apps. But we also realized that the performance of the compiled code was disappointing on real codebases.

As an example, our first benchmarking result on our first large-scale (~1M sloc) customer code was around forty times (40x) slower than native. Not only was this result disappointing, but it also was much worse than what we were expecting based on our internal benchmarks.

One year later, after significant effort focused on performance optimizations, we are here today to announce Cheerp 1.1...

Announcing Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 – standalone C++ tools for build environments--Marian Luparu

You can now compile using Visual C++ without Visual Studio:

Announcing Visual C++ Build Tools 2015 – standalone C++ tools for build environments

by Marian Luparu

From the article:

Together with the availability of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RC, we’re also announcing a new way of acquiring the C++ tools: as a standalone installer that only lays down the tools required to build C++ projects without installing the Visual Studio IDE. This new installer is meant to streamline the delivery of the C++ build tools in your build environments and continuous-integration systems.

CLion 1.2 is released

CLion 1.2 is released with Google Test support, CMake live templates and variables completion, C++ parser and debugger performance improvements, and many other features on board.

CLion 1.2 is here!

by Anastasia Kazakova

From the article

This release covers various essentials of the software development process: unit testing, writing CMake files, working with version control, general IDE look & feel and beyond. Read on for more details.

It's also aligned with updates for other desktop products that comprise JetBrains Toolbox, that in addition makes CLion available within the All products pack.

New version of CLion, a cross-platform C and C++ IDE, is released

Summer brings the new release of CLion, a cross-platform C/C++ IDE from JetBrains.

Welcome CLion 1.1 with improved C++ parser, LLDB on OS X, and code style settings

by Anastasia Kazakova

From the post, there are the new features and improvements on board:

  • Massive C++ parser overhaul to handle tricky modern C++ cases.
  • LLDB integration for OS X users.
  • Predefined code styles (like for example Google, Qt, GNU, Stroustrup).
  • New code styles settings for CMake
  • And more

Find a demo from Dmitri Nesteruk at the end of the post.

Boost Version 1.59 Released

The next version of boost is released.

Boost 1.59

From the release note:

These new libraries has been added:

  • Convert: An extendible and configurable type-conversion framework, from Vladimir Batov.
  • Coroutine2: (C++14) Coroutine library, from Oliver Kowalke.

A huge number of bugfixes and improvements were implemented for the existing libraries.

 

Many thanks to all contributors and maintainer!

C++ concepts support merged into gcc trunk

An evolution of gcc occured:

C++ concepts support merged into gcc trunk

From the article:

I've been banging on the concepts branch for the past month after Andrew told me it was about ready to merge, fixing bugs and streamlining things there to get familiar with the code while I could still look at it as a whole rather than mixed in with the rest of the compiler. But I think I've reached diminishing returns and so I'm going to go ahead and merge it into the trunk...