Well, there are a couple of new releases of Ghostscript out now, for both GPL and AFPL branches. There's a fairly significant security fix. You should upgrade.

These releases also contain IJS and autoconf. I haven't gotten much feedback yet from actual IJS users - I know this stuff takes time.

Mono

It's really good that we're having this flamewar^W discussion. I can definitely sympathize with the desire for better languages and tools, but adopting new stuff being driven by a highly proprietary company comes at a significant cost. I am not convinced yet that C# is dramatically better than choose-one-of C++ and Java. Add to the mix the fact that both languages are at least modestly mature and have half-decent implementations.

In a few years, when C# is also modestly mature and is half-decently implemented, it might be worth reconsidering. Of course, by that time, C++ and Java will be a lot more mature and well implemented :)

I found this article to be quite good, providing solid technical refutation of the clr's language neutrality claims. Despite the javalobby.org url, I found the article to be not especially biased towards Java either.

C# ultimately has the same problem as Java: the standard libraries are dictated by a proprietary company. It's very likely that Microsoft won't fuck them up as badly as Sun has, but it's also certain that the standard libraries won't be tuned for the needs of free software developers either.

SVG

The ksvg project is starting to come along pretty nicely. They use libart for the rendering, which is a good choice :)

It's something of an NIH project, given that there's a reasonable start at an SVG implementation in Gill and rsvg (which are based on the same codebase). There are quite a few things that rsvg does correctly (like opacity in groups), but ksvg doesn't do yet. It's sometimes irritating to see people struggle with problems you've solved a long time ago.

On the plus side, the ksvg developers have the Gill/rsvg code available as a reference, and also frequently invite me to their irc channel. NIH does not always mean a total waste of duplicated effort :)

Rebar

I've been hacking a little on a project which has been dormant for a while: rebar, my NuPerfect autoconf/make replacement.

Rebar is, of course, also very much an NIH project, given that the autotools teetering-house-of-cards already exists (the word "toolchain" conveys much more dignity than auto* really deserves), and there are plenty of other projects aiming to replace it as well. I'll try my best to read and understand the related work before releasing rebar upon the world. So far, my biggest inspirations have been auto*, Vesta, Python distutils, and jam. I've also looked at Ant, SCons, and OS X's ProjectBuilder. There are a bunch more I need to study, I know. At the top of the list is .NET's "Assembly" mechanism. (note: does anyone have a reference to a reasonable document on this mechanism? thanks in advance)

In any case, the current rebar snapshot currently compiles a hello world example :)

Thesis

I've also got a bit more written on my thesis. It's challenging finding time for it on top of everything else, but I'm determined to finish it sooner or later.