Blogs
cling goes public!
Submitted by axel on Tue, 30/08/2011 - 21:08Hi,
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.
New C++ Standard!
Submitted by axel on Wed, 17/08/2011 - 13:23Hi,
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.
CERN in the C++ Standards Committee
Submitted by axel on Sun, 19/06/2011 - 09:14Hi,
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.
TextInput: The Prompt
Submitted by axel on Tue, 07/06/2011 - 13:52Hi,
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.
Release Candidate
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.
White?!
Submitted by axel on Sun, 01/05/2011 - 00:55Hi,
We have released a development release about a week ago. Probably not many people noticed - but it contains a revolution, and we'd like to know what you think about it: is it too brutal? Is it what you were longing for all your life?
The revolution I was referring to is not pink, orange, jasmine (is that a color?) or green: it's white and clean. It's ROOT's new default style and a modernization of the GUI look.

ROOT Calendar
Submitted by axel on Thu, 31/03/2011 - 16:03Hi!
We are going to change the way we do releases: we will have release candidates! On a release branch!
Fons has created a Google Calendar that's public (for reading :-), which shows the schedule for the next production release:
AIX and dladdr
Submitted by axel on Thu, 31/03/2011 - 15:51Hi!
This is a post that is relevant to about 0.000000% (o, I forgot a "1"!) of the readers: how to implement the missing dladdr() in AIX5. I could not find it anywhere, nobody seemed to have an implementation - and CINT needs it. So when porting v5.28.00 to AIX5 I needed to deal with it.
To save other people from going mad, here's the code:
When You Care About Build Systems
Submitted by axel on Mon, 21/02/2011 - 15:52Hi!
Build systems belong to the world's most irrelevant things. That is: if they work: if they rebuild the parts that depend on a change, if they work for all platforms, and if they are fast. We are pretty happy with our unspectacular configure && make build system: it gets the dependencies right, and (thanks to cygwin) works on all platforms. But how does it do in terms of speed?
Where Is My Backtrace?
Submitted by axel on Fri, 18/02/2011 - 09:33Hi!
I noticed that lately, on Ubuntu 10.10, I dont get any! backtrace! anymore! Nothing! I ran e.g.
root [0] TObject *o = (TObject*)8764586 root [1] o->GetName() *** Break *** segmentation violation Root > .q