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New opensource C/C++ Frontend

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A new C/C++ frontend is being developed - clang. It's aimed for the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The interesting part is the motivation for it (you can read about it in the slides introducing it) - the main goal is to get a good intermediate representation (AST) which can be easily consumed by other tools (static code analysis, etc.) Moreover, they want to have excellent diagnostics support (though this smells like fixing the problems with C and C++ from the wrong side, in my opinion the syntax is long due for an overhaul). Looks very interesting, and as Apple is behind this, there is hope that this one will eventually become usable.

FileZilla 3.0 Final released

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The FilleZilla Team just released FileZilla 3.0. Grab it from here while it's hot. FileZilla is an excellent, free, OpenSource FTP client, and now works on Linux and Windows. I'm using it since several years and never ever had a problem with it.

VC++ future and where is Microsoft going today?

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Recently, Microsoft is quite open about the future of VC++, unlike the years before, and things are looking good actually. Herb Sutter is busy working on Concur (see Concur & C++ Presentation at Google Video). Nice to see a real guru like him working on concurrency stuff, cause he might have a chance to get it working and used (after all, he is the chairman of the ISO C++ committee and the VC++ lead). The VC++ compiler is getting a new frontend. This also includes a new code model which, for the first time, allows access to the compiler's AST. While it might sound like a normal thing these days, the AST wasn't available earlier because the compiler is partly 20 years old:

"In the days of the 256K limit, a large, in-memory structure such as a whole-program AST was not feasible"

Note this is all post-Orcas, so we're talking about Visual Studio 201x here. They're also working on the native code side (even the vice president understood now that native code isn't going anywhere), including stuff from C++ 0x. Interesting stuff going on for sure, after they have fallen behind with the compiler quite a bit compared to the latest Intel C++ or Sun Studio.