axel's blog

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.

Hi,

We, the cling team, have announced cling, our C++ interpreter prototype! (note: its SVN repository has changed compared with the announcement email; see the build instructions)

To a large extend thanks to Vassil's impressive commitment, cling now behaves like a good C++ interpreter: it runs C++ code that's entered, and prints the results.

Hi,

The new C++ standard has been approved: 21 countries voted "yes", 0 "no", and 14 abstained. The official name will be ISO/IEC 14882:2011(E). But there is an ongoing discussion whether the nick name should be C++0x or C++11 - given that the the next version should be published within the current decade.

Hi,

CERN is now a member of the C++ standards committee.

The LHC experiments and CERN itself use and have created a C++ code base of an estimated 50 million lines of code. Tens years, thousands of developers. About 10,000 people using C++ connected at CERN: users and staff. Given those numbers it makes sense to have opinions on the language features, and to share these opinions with the body that defines the language - just like Fermilab does already.

Hi,

As you have probably noticed, colors arrived at ROOT's prompt about a year ago: known types got blue, matching parentheses light up green, non-matching ones red. Nothing spectacular, except for the fact that this was done by a summer student, and that it was possible without readline. She used the editline library instead.

Hi,

ROOT now follows a pattern that's pretty common out there: before publishing the next production release v5.30 end of June, we will have two release candidates: v5-30-00-rc1 and -rc2. Only corrections will go into the release branch between these release candidates and the final release. RC1 has just been published.