C++11 tempts OSS: KDevelop 4.6 IDE, KDE Frameworks 5, Qt 5.0 (Phoronix)

By Blog Staff | Dec 4, 2012 05:17 PM | Tags: None

HT to Michael Larabel and Phoronix: It's great to see more projects moving to adopt modern C++11, from C++98/03 and even from C. Here are three fairly well-known projects in the "thinking about" stage of taking the plunge.

More Open-Source Projects Eyeing Up C++11

by Michael Larabel

KDE developers are currently contemplating the idea of allowing a subset of the C++11 language to be used within the KDevelop code-base. This C++11 change would happen for the KDevelop 4.6 integrated development environment release. Reasons are shared in this article for why one should consider using C++11 code.

[...]

Qt 5.0 is taking advantage of C++11 too, but there it's being handled in a backwards compatible manner so the code will still build as C++03 on older compilers. There is also more Qt C++11 developer information shared via slides from the recent Qt Developer Days event.

KDE Frameworks 5 may also use C++11.

Continue reading...

Applied Informatics C++ Libraries and Tools Release 2012.1 now available

By Blog Staff | Nov 30, 2012 12:21 PM | Tags: None

Release 2012.1 of Applied Informatics C++ Libraries and Tools is now available.

These libraries extend the POCO C++ Libraries with additional features, including:

• Remoting for RPC/IPC and SOAP/WSDL web services, including SOAP 1.1 and 1.2
• Open Service Platform for building modular, extensible applications
• DNSSD/Zeroconf
• Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
• Fast Infoset processing
• Secure remote access to smart devices.

New in release 2012.1 are:

• Support for C++ code generation from XML Schema and WSDL documents
• Allowing Remoting to invoke SOAP 1.1/1.2 web services created using other middleware technologies such as Java JAX-WS or Microsoft .NET WCF
• New Remoting featuers to support MTOM, HTTP Basic and Digest authentication and HTTP compression (gzip content encoding), as well as remote events with the new TCP transport

A free evaluation version is available for download.

Reactive Extensions (Rx) now supports LINQ in C++, goes open source

By Blog Staff | Nov 15, 2012 04:40 PM | Tags: None

Reactive Extensions (Rx) is now open source and supports LINQ styles in C++.

From the announcement, Rx is already being used for a number of highly responsive applications including GitHub for Windows:

According to Paul Betts at GitHub, "GitHub for Windows uses the Reactive Extensions for almost everything it does, including network requests, UI events, managing child processes (git.exe). Using Rx and ReactiveUI, we've written a fast, nearly 100% asynchronous, responsive application, while still having 100% deterministic, reliable unit tests. The desktop developers at GitHub loved Rx so much, that the Mac team created their own version of Rx and ReactiveUI, called ReactiveCocoa, and are now using it on the Mac to obtain similar benefits."

In addition to Rx's original support for .NET and new support for Javascript, Rx has also added support for C++:

Rx++: The Reactive Extensions for Native (RxC) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators in both C and C++.

Ix++: An implementation of LINQ for Native Developers in C++.

Where to download or find out more: https://rx.codeplex.com/

CGAL 4.1 released (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library)

By Blog Staff | Nov 11, 2012 02:25 PM | Tags: None

The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.1 of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

Besides fixes to existing packages, the following has changed since CGAL 4.0:

• New compiler support: the Apple Clang compiler versions 3.1 and 3.2 are now supported on Mac OS X.

See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.

The CGAL project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, easy-to-use, and efficient C++ software library of geometric data structures and algorithms, like

• triangulations (2D constrained triangulations and Delaunaytriangulations in 2D and 3D, periodic triangulations),
• Voronoi diagrams (for 2D and 3D points, 2D additively weighted Voronoi diagrams, and segment Voronoi diagrams),
• Boolean operations on polygons and polyhedra,
• regularized Boolean operations on polygons with curved arcs
• arrangements of curves,
• mesh generation (2D, 3D and surface mesh generation, surface mesh subdivision and parametrization),
• alpha shapes (in 2D and 3D),
• convex hull algorithms (in 2D, 3D and dD),
• operations on polygons (straight skeleton and offset polygon),
• search structures (kd trees for nearest neighbor search, and range and segment trees),
• interpolation (natural neighbor interpolation and placement of streamlines),
• optimization algorithms (smallest enclosing sphere of points or spheres, smallest enclosing ellipsoid of points, principal component analysis),
• kinetic data structures

Some modules are distributed under the terms of the LGPL Open Source license (GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later versions). Most modules are distributed under the terms of the GPL Open Source license (GNU General Public License v3 or later versions). If your intended usage does not meet the criteria of the aforementioned licenses, a commercial license can be purchased from GeometryFactory.

For further information and for downloading the library and its documentation, please visit the CGAL web site.

just::thread 1.8.2 released: C++11 thread library supports Ubuntu Quantal and Fedora 17

By Blog Staff | Nov 6, 2012 02:00 PM | Tags: None

just::thread 1.8.2 is now available.

Anthony Williams' implementation of the C++11 threading library adds support for gcc 4.7.2, and consequently official support for Ubuntu Quantal and Fedora 17.

just::thread is now available for the following compilers:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows,
• TDM gcc 4.5.2 and 4.6.1 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows,
• g++ 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 (4.7.2 or later) for both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux (x86/x86_64), and
• MacPorts g++ 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 (4.7.2 or later) for 32-bit and 64-bit MacOSX.

Boost 1.52.0 released

By Blog Staff | Nov 5, 2012 08:11 PM | Tags: None

Release 1.52.0 of the Boost C++ Libraries is now available.

These open-source libraries work well with the C++ Standard Library, and are usable across a broad spectrum of applications. The Boost license encourages both commercial and non-commercial use.

Releases 1.51.0 and 1.52.0 contain one new library (Boost.Context, by Oliver Kowalke) and numerous enhancements and bug fixes for existing libraries.

Here are some useful links for 1.52.0.

• Details, including download links.
• NOTE: A breaking change related to decltype and result_of is described in this special release note.
• You can also download directly from SourceForge.
• To install this release on your system, see getting started.

Many thanks to the Boost release team:

    Beman Dawes
    Daniel James
    Eric Niebler
    Marshall Clow
    Rene Rivera
    Vladimir Prus

We very much appreciate their continued hard work.

POCO 1.5.0 available

By Blog Staff | Oct 15, 2012 10:09 PM | Tags: None

Development release 1.5.0 of POCO is now available. See the changelog or download here.

Major new features include:

• a significantly improved Data framework
• the new JSON library
• lots of other improvements

Please note that this is a development release and not considered stable. Interfaces may change, backwards compatibility may be broken, not all platforms may work and there may be some rough edges.

Casablanca: C++ on Azure -- John Azariah and Mahesh Krishnan

By Blog Staff | Sep 19, 2012 02:55 PM | Tags: None

Casablanca is a Microsoft incubation effort to support cloud-based client-server communication in native code using a modern asynchronous C++ API design. Think of it as Node.js, but using C++ -- from simple services, to JSON and REST, to Azure storage and deployment, and more.

Casablanca gives you the power to use existing native C++ libraries and code to do awesome things on the cloud server. In this talk from TechEd Australia, John Azariah and Mahesh Krishnan show how it's done.

ASIO: Portable Stackless Coroutines in One* Header -- Chris Kohlhoff

By Blog Staff | Sep 17, 2012 09:01 AM | Tags: advanced

Via C++ Next, hat tip to Dave Abrahams:

Chris Kohlhoff’s ASIO library contains an extraordinary little header, not in the public interface, but in the examples directory, that implements what he calls “Stackless Coroutines” (very similar to Python’s Simple Generators if you’re familiar with those). He does it completely portably, with just a few macros, and considering that there are zero lines of platform-specific code, they work amazingly well.

Dave cites this article that describes how to use the coroutines:

A potted guide to stackless coroutines

Keen-eyed Asio users may have noticed that Boost 1.42 includes a new example, HTTP Server 4, that shows how to use stackless coroutines in conjunction with asynchronous operations. This follows on from the coroutines I explored in the previous three posts, but with a few improvements. In particular:

• the pesky entry pseudo-keyword is gone; and
• a new fork pseudo-keyword has been added.

The result bears a passing resemblance to C#'s yield and friends. This post aims to document my stackless coroutine API, but before launching into a long and wordy explanation, here's a little picture to liven things up...

VC++ 2012 Desktop Express (free)

By Blog Staff | Sep 12, 2012 11:42 AM | Tags: None

Today Microsoft released another free Express version of Visual C++ 2012. In addition to the free Express Visual C++ compiler for building tablet applications, Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop directly supports traditional Windows and command-line applications in C++.

This a great free C++ compiler on Windows for everything from hobby development to using and contributing to open source projects. Besides additional C++11 standards conformance with range-for, override and final on the language side (with more to come in the coming months; watch this space) and a complete C++11 standard library implementation, the free compiler also includes unit testing framework for C++, code analysis for C++ (try /analyze today if you haven't already, as John Carmack says so well), C++ AMP for GPGPU programming, and much more.

See also the longer announcement here.