Vernal equinox

Spring is here !

Google just published the list of this year’s GSoC mentoring organizations. DocBook will participate for a first time, as will (as usual) Boost. If you are interested in any of this, don’t hesitate to get in touch !

I have also started looking into switching to CLang as Cpp/C/Cxx parsers for Synopsis. While this looks very promising, there is still quite a lot of work that needs to be done before this will be usable. Any help is highly appreciated.

Syndicated 2010-03-20 15:33:33 from stefan.seefeld.name

A matter of perspective.

“Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America - and it’s not flattering. That much of the world - composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity - isn’t happy with the United States is not news.”

See, what “much of the world” isn’t happy with may not be “the United States”, but this dangerously stupid and arrogant world-view. Grow up, start to consider yourself part of the world, not above it, and things may get a little more balanced.

Syndicated 2009-10-11 14:14:11 from stefan.seefeld.name

Google Summer of Code

A too short and too rainy summer has almost passed by in a blink of an eye. I mentored two GSoC projects this year. One of them, adding Python 3 support to boost.python, was very successful, and I just merged the changes into trunk. As I don’t expect any surprises there, I’m sure the code will be ready for inclusion into the next release. Yay !

The other project wasn’t quite as successful. Not only did it require a lot more hand-holding from my part, but it didn’t result in nearly as much improvements as we had hoped for.

Neither result came as a surprise. In fact, I probably could have predicted it when reviewing the applications. But as I’m an optimist, I always hope for a better outcome, even if there are warning signs. As I will participate in this year’s GSoC Mentor Summit, I’m sure I will hear from other people what they have to suggest as to how to evaluate proposals to avoid surprises.

Syndicated 2009-09-21 15:12:35 from stefan.seefeld.name

Montreal Jazzfest

It’s this time of year again. I typically don’t go to many concerts, but instead take my refill a little earlier in the year, at the Festival Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville. Not so this year. The FIMAV organizers had decided (or where forced) to skip a year, so I went looking for interesting concerts here in Montréal to take in. Usually this is a little hard, as the festival has somewhat degraded over the years, to the point that some even call it the “Carneval du Jazz”.

I was lucky, though, and got to see two concerts: One with Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, and Antonio Sanchez. The other with Bill Frisell, Ron Miles, Tony Scherr, and Rudy Royston.
Both concerts were fabulous. As each time, I’m totally blown away by Bill Frisell’s ensembles, and their musicality.

Syndicated 2009-07-09 04:06:43 from stefan.seefeld.name

Synopsis

Today I made a new Synopsis release. Its main feature is an updated Cpp processor (aka. ‘preprocessor’) which is able to annotate macros and cross-reference them, just as Synopsis does with C and C++ declarations.
I updated the ucpp version that is used as backend. Hacking the required support hooks into that was surprisingly delicate.
Unfortunately, ucpp’s author and boost’s preprocessor experts disagree on the interpretation of the CPP specification, resulting in it not being able to process an important part of boost correctly.
A couple of years ago I attempted to use boost.wave as an alternative Cpp processor backend. Unfortunately, that has its own share of bugs, which very much restrict its usefulness, at least for applications such as Synopsis.

Syndicated 2009-04-17 18:49:04 from stefan.seefeld.name