axel's blog

Hi everyone, dear Matt!

Matt Walker has posted an extensive review of ROOT and what he would hope the future of ROOT to be. Because I think many of his comments are good ones, and because I have heard some of them from several people in the past, I decided to give the answer to an audience that's little bit wider, in a dedicated post.

Hi,

A new C++ meeting is coming up in a few days. Many, many proposals are on the table; they can be found here and here. Out of those proposals only very few will be discussed at the meeting; likely only those that are about to make it into C++14.

Hi!

We are running late with ROOT 6, in part because I'm just back at work after being sick for 4 weeks. The other cling team members were hacking away at Fermilab, and I'll demonstrate how major that step to version 6 is for ROOT.

Hi,

Two weeks ago I participated at the ISO C++ standard meeting. It was my and CERN's first one and a pleasant surprise. A few news items:

Hi,

A delegation of the ROOT team (Fons, Vassil and I) have been invited by Google Zurich to give a Tech Talk on cling. We had a great night in Zurich. Great nights always have consequences on the next day - but as "talk quality" and "nightlife fun" are in different dimensions there is no obvious measure for optimizing these two; everyone will have his or her own favorite combination of both. Mine meant Aspirin the next morning.

Hi,

I wish you a relaxing break - be it Christmas, Hanukah, family or presents. All the best for next year: start off with a good party, go on with successful physics and a happy private life! And where applicable, please continue to use ROOT in 2012 ;-)

As a little ROOTy Christmas gift, enjoy this old but still fantastic xkcd episode (read this for explanations):

Hi,

"A ROOT User" asks "Is it really necessary to replace CINT dictionary with cling?", bringing up very reasonable concerns and arguments against re-implementing CINT. I will try to answer his comments to clarify why we do it, and how it connects with the rest.

Hi,

One of ROOT's traditional features: you can use it on any platform. That was especially true in the past: Linux, Windows, MacOS, Solaris, AIX, HPUX - you name it: ROOT was there. But now we have a different environment: devices are getting smaller, and next to good old Linux and Windows in new cloths (Android, Windows Mobile) we have new, dedicated mobile OSes like iOS.

Hi,

The C++ standards committee has published the LaTeX sources of the standard documents (as they are now, not the ones used for the standardization of C++2011) at https://github.com/cplusplus/draft. I.e. if you don't like the way a compiler looks at your code, you can now edit the document, run it through LaTeX, and claim that your compiler doesn't do what's in your copy of the standard! ;-)

Hi,

Marcelo asked about how I see the future of dictionaries with cling, if we manage to replace CINT with cling. Given that many people probably don't know what those "dictionaries" really do, I decided to post it! I'll keep it as simple and short as possible.