Beyond Linux® From Scratch - Version 8.0

Chapter 13. Programming

Other Programming Tools

Introduction

This section is provided to show you some additional programming tools for which instructions have not yet been created in the book or for those that are not appropriate for the book. Note that these packages may not have been tested by the BLFS team, but their mention here is meant to be a convenient source of additional information.

User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/OtherProgrammingTools

Programming Frameworks, Languages and Compilers

A+

A+ is a powerful and efficient programming language. It is freely available under the GNU General Public License. It embodies a rich set of functions and operators, a modern graphical user interface with many widgets and automatic synchronization of widgets and variables, asynchronous execution of functions associated with variables and events, dynamic loading of user compiled subroutines, and many other features. Execution is by a rather efficient interpreter. A+ was created at Morgan Stanley. Primarily used in a computationally-intensive business environment, many critical applications written in A+ have withstood the demands of real world developers over many years. Written in an interpreted language, A+ applications tend to be portable.

ABC

ABC is an interactive programming language and environment for personal computing, originally intended as a good replacement for BASIC. It was designed by first doing a task analysis of the programming task. ABC is easy to learn (an hour or so for someone who has already programmed), and yet easy to use. Originally intended as a language for beginners, it has evolved into a powerful tool for beginners and experts alike. Some features of the language include: a powerful collection of only five data types that easily combines strong typing, yet without declarations, no limitations (such as max int), apart from sheer exhaustion of memory refinements to support top-down programming, nesting by indentation and programs typically are one fourth or one fifth the size of the equivalent Pascal or C program.

ALF

ALF is a language which combines functional and logic programming techniques. The foundation of ALF is Horn clause logic with equality which consists of predicates and Horn clauses for logic programming, and functions and equations for functional programming. The ALF system is an efficient implementation of the combination of resolution, narrowing, rewriting and rejection. Similarly to Prolog, ALF uses a backtracking strategy corresponding to a depth-first search in the derivation tree.

ASM

ASM is a Java bytecode manipulation framework. It can be used to dynamically generate stub classes or other proxy classes, directly in binary form, or to dynamically modify classes at load time, i.e., just before they are loaded into the Java Virtual Machine. ASM offers similar functionalities as BCEL or SERP, but is much smaller (33KB instead of 350KB for BCEL and 150KB for SERP) and faster than these tools (the overhead of a load time class transformation is of the order of 60% with ASM, 700% or more with BCEL, and 1100% or more with SERP). Indeed ASM was designed to be used in a dynamic way (though it works statically as well) and was therefore designed and implemented to be as small and as fast as possible.

BCPL

BCPL is a simple typeless language that was designed in 1966 by Martin Richards and implemented for the first time at MIT in the Spring of 1967.

BETA

BETA is developed within the Scandinavian School of object-orientation, where the first object-oriented language, Simula, was developed. BETA is a modern language in the Simula tradition. The resulting language is smaller than Simula in spite of being considerably more expressive. BETA is a strongly typed language like Simula, Eiffel and C++, with most type checking being carried out at compile-time. It is well known that it is not possible to obtain all type checking at compile time without sacrificing the expressiveness of the language. BETA has optimum balance between compile-time type checking and run-time type checking.

<bigwig>

<bigwig> is a high-level programming language for developing interactive Web services. Programs are compiled into a conglomerate of lower-level technologies such as C code, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, and SSL, all running on top of a runtime system based on an Apache Web server module. It is a descendant of the Mawl project but is a completely new design and implementation with vastly expanded ambitions. The <bigwig> language is really a collection of tiny domain-specific languages focusing on different aspects of interactive Web services. These contributing languages are held together by a C-like skeleton language. Thus, <bigwig> has the look and feel of C-programs but with special data and control structures.

Bigloo

Bigloo is a Scheme implementation devoted to one goal: enabling Scheme based programming style where C(++) is usually required. Bigloo attempts to make Scheme practical by offering features usually presented by traditional programming languages but not offered by Scheme and functional programming. Bigloo compiles Scheme modules and delivers small and fast stand-alone binary executables. It enables full connections between Scheme and C programs, between Scheme and Java programs, and between Scheme and C# programs.

C--

C-- is a portable assembly language that can be generated by a front end and implemented by any of several code generators. It serves as an interface between high-level compilers and retargetable, optimizing code generators. Authors of front ends and code generators can cooperate easily.

Caml

Caml is a general-purpose programming language, designed with program safety and reliability in mind. It is very expressive, yet easy to learn and use. Caml supports functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming styles. It has been developed and distributed by INRIA, France's national research institute for computer science, since 1985. The Objective Caml system is the main implementation of the Caml language. It features a powerful module system and a full-fledged object-oriented layer. It comes with a native-code compiler that supports numerous architectures, for high performance; a bytecode compiler, for increased portability; and an interactive loop, for experimentation and rapid development.

Ch

Ch is an embeddable C/C++ interpreter for cross-platform scripting, shell programming, 2D/3D plotting, numerical computing, and embedded scripting.

Clean

Clean is a general purpose, state-of-the-art, pure and lazy functional programming language designed for making real-world applications. Clean is the only functional language in the world which offers uniqueness typing. This type system makes it possible in a pure functional language to incorporate destructive updates of arbitrary data structures (including arrays) and to make direct interfaces to the outside imperative world. The type system makes it possible to develop efficient applications.

Cyclone

Cyclone is a programming language based on C that is safe, meaning that it rules out programs that have buffer overflows, dangling pointers, format string attacks, and so on. High-level, type-safe languages, such as Java, Scheme, or ML also provide safety, but they don't give the same control over data representations and memory management that C does (witness the fact that the run-time systems for these languages are usually written in C.) Furthermore, porting legacy C code to these languages or interfacing with legacy C libraries is a difficult and error-prone process. The goal of Cyclone is to give programmers the same low-level control and performance of C without sacrificing safety, and to make it easy to port or interface with legacy C code.

D

D is a general purpose systems and applications programming language. It is a higher level language than C++, but retains the ability to write high performance code and interface directly with the operating system APIs and with hardware. D is well suited to writing medium to large scale million line programs with teams of developers. It is easy to learn, provides many capabilities to aid the programmer, and is well suited to aggressive compiler optimization technology. D is not a scripting language, nor an interpreted language. It doesn't come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding philosophy. It's a practical language for practical programmers who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code. D is the culmination of decades of experience implementing compilers for many diverse languages, and attempting to construct large projects using those languages. It draws inspiration from those other languages (most especially C++) and tempers it with experience and real world practicality.

DMDScript

DMDScript is Digital Mars' implementation of the ECMA 262 scripting language. Netscape's implementation is called JavaScript, Microsoft's implementation is called JScript. DMDScript is much faster than other implementations, which you can verify with the included benchmark.

DotGNU Portable.NET

DotGNU Portable.NET goal is to build a suite of free software tools to build and execute .NET applications, including a C# compiler, assembler, disassembler, and runtime engine. While the initial target platform was GNU/Linux, it is also known to run under Windows, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and MacOS X. The runtime engine has been tested on the x86, PowerPC, ARM, Sparc, PARISC, s390, Alpha, and IA-64 processors. DotGNU Portable.NET is part of the DotGNU project, built in accordance with the requirements of the GNU Project. DotGNU Portable.NET is focused on compatibility with the ECMA specifications for CLI. There are other projects under the DotGNU meta-project to build other necessary pieces of infrastructure, and to explore non-CLI approaches to virtual machine implementation.

Dylan

Dylan is an advanced, object-oriented, dynamic language which supports rapid program development. When needed, programs can be optimized for more efficient execution by supplying more type information to the compiler. Nearly all entities in Dylan (including functions, classes, and basic data types such as integers) are first class objects. Additionally, Dylan supports multiple inheritance, polymorphism, multiple dispatch, keyword arguments, object introspection, macros, and many other advanced features... --Peter Hinely.

E

E is a secure distributed Java-based pure-object platform and p2p scripting language. It has two parts: ELib and the E Language. Elib provides the stuff that goes on between objects. As a pure-Java library, ELib provides for inter-process capability-secure distributed programming. Its cryptographic capability protocol enables mutually suspicious Java processes to cooperate safely, and its event-loop concurrency and promise pipelining enable high performance deadlock free distributed pure-object computing. The E Language can be used to express what happens within an object. It provides a convenient and familiar notation for the ELib computational model, so you can program in one model rather than two. Under the covers, this notation expands into Kernel-E, a minimalist lambda-language much like Scheme or Smalltalk. Objects written in the E language are only able to interact with other objects according to ELib's semantics, enabling object granularity intra-process security, including the ability to safely run untrusted mobile code (such as caplets).

elastiC

elastiC is a portable high-level object-oriented interpreted language with a C like syntax. Its main characteristics are: open source, interpreted, has portable bytecode compilation, dynamic typing, automatic real very fast garbage collection, object oriented with meta-programming support (a la Smalltalk), functional programming support (Scheme-like closures with lexical scoping, and eval-like functionality), hierarchical namespaces, a rich set of useful built-in types (dynamic arrays, dictionaries, symbols, ...), extensible with C (you can add functions, types, classes, methods, packages, ...), embeddable in C. elastiC has been strongly influenced by C, Smalltalk, Scheme and Python and tries to merge the best characteristics of all these languages, while still coherently maintaining its unique personality.

Erlang/OTP

Erlang/OTP is a development environment based on Erlang. Erlang is a programming language which has many features more commonly associated with an operating system than with a programming language: concurrent processes, scheduling, memory management, distribution, networking, etc. The initial open-source Erlang release contains the implementation of Erlang, as well as a large part of Ericsson's middleware for building distributed high-availability systems. Erlang is characterized by the following features: robustness, soft real-time, hot code upgrades and incremental code loading.

Euphoria

Euphoria is a simple, flexible, and easy-to-learn programming language. It lets you quickly and easily develop programs for Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD. Euphoria was first released in 1993. Since then Rapid Deployment Software has been steadily improving it with the help of a growing number of enthusiastic users. Although Euphoria provides subscript checking, uninitialized variable checking and numerous other run-time checks, it is extremely fast. People have used it to develop high-speed DOS games, Windows GUI programs, and X Window System programs. It is also very useful for CGI (Web-based) programming.

Felix

Felix is an advanced Algol like procedural programming language with a strong functional subsystem. It features ML style static typing, first class functions, pattern matching, garbage collection, polymorphism, and has built in support for high performance microthreading, regular expressions and context free parsing. The system provides a scripting harness so the language can be used like other scripting languages such as Python and Perl, but underneath it generates native code to obtain high performance. A key feature of the system is that it uses the C/C++ object model, and provides an advanced binding sublanguage to support integration with C/C++ at both the source and object levels, both for embedding C/C++ data types and functions into Felix, and for embedding Felix into existing C++ architectures. The Felix compiler is written in Objective Caml, and generates ISO C++ which should compile on any platform.

ferite

ferite is a scripting language and engine all in one manageable chunk. It is designed to be easily extended in terms of API, and to be used within other applications making them more configurable and useful to the end user. It has a syntax similar to a number of other languages but remains clean and its own language.

Forth

Forth is a stack-based, extensible language without type-checking. It is probably best known for its "reverse Polish" (postfix) arithmetic notation, familiar to users of Hewlett-Packard calculators. Forth is a real-time programming language originally developed to control telescopes. Forth has many unique features and applications: it can compile itself into a new compiler, reverse-polish coding, edit time error checking and compiling (similar to BASIC), extremely efficient thread based language, can be used to debug itself, extensible; thus can become what ever you need it to be. The links below lead to the website of the Forth Interest Group (FIG), a world-wide, non-profit organization for education in and the promotion of the Forth computer language. Another worthwhile website dedicated to the Forth community is http://wiki.forthfreak.net/.

GNU Smalltalk

GNU Smalltalk is a free implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language which runs on most versions on Unix and, in general, everywhere you can find a POSIX-compliance library. An uncommon feature of it is that it is well-versed to scripting tasks and headless processing. See http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/manual/html_node/Overview.html for a more detailed explanation of GNU Smalltalk.

Haskell

Haskell is a computer programming language. In particular, it is a polymorphicly typed, lazy, purely functional language, quite different from most other programming languages. The language is named for Haskell Brooks Curry, whose work in mathematical logic serves as a foundation for functional languages. Haskell is based on lambda calculus. There are many implementations of Haskell, among them:

HLA (High Level Assembly)

The HLA language was developed as a tool to help teach assembly language programming and machine organization to University students at the University of California, Riverside. The basic idea was to teach students assembly language programming by leveraging their knowledge of high level languages like C/C++ and Pascal/Delphi. At the same time, HLA was designed to allow advanced assembly language programmers write more readable and more powerful assembly language code.

Icon

Icon is a high-level, general-purpose programming language with a large repertoire of features for processing data structures and character strings. It is an imperative, procedural language with a syntax reminiscent of C and Pascal, but with semantics at a much higher level.

Io

Io is a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

J

J is a modern, high-level, general-purpose, high-performance programming language. It is portable and runs on Windows, Unix, Mac, and PocketPC handhelds, both as a GUI and in a console. True 64-bit J systems are available for XP64 or Linux64, on AMD64 or Intel EM64T platforms. J systems can be installed and distributed for free.

Jamaica

Jamaica, the JVM Macro Assembler, is an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use assembly language for JVM bytecode programming. It uses Java syntax to define a JVM class except for the method body that takes bytecode instructions, including Jamaica's built-in macros. In Jamaica, bytecode instructions use mnemonics and symbolic names for all variables, parameters, data fields, constants and labels.

Joy

Joy is a purely functional programming language. Whereas all other functional programming languages are based on the application of functions to arguments, Joy is based on the composition of functions. All such functions take a stack as an argument and produce a stack as a value. Consequently much of Joy looks like ordinary postfix notation. However, in Joy a function can consume any number of parameters from the stack and leave any number of results on the stack. The concatenation of appropriate programs denotes the composition of the functions which the programs denote.

Judo

Judo is a practical, functional scripting language. It is designed to cover the use cases of not only algorithmic/object-oriented/multi-threaded programming and Java scripting but also a number of major application domain tasks, such as scripting for JDBC, WSDL, ActiveX, OS, multiple file/data formats, etc. Despite its rich functionality, the base language is extremely simple, and domain support syntax is totally intuitive to domain experts, so that even though you have never programmed in Judo, you would have little trouble figuring out what the code does.

JWIG

JWIG is a Java-based high-level programming language for development of interactive Web services. It contains an advanced session model, a flexible mechanism for dynamic construction of XML documents, in particular XHTML, and a powerful API for simplifying use of the HTTP protocol and many other aspects of Web service programming. To support program development, JWIG provides a unique suite of highly specialized program analysers that at compile time verify for a given program that no runtime errors can occur while building documents or receiving form input, and that all documents being shown are valid according to the document type definition for XHTML 1.0. The main goal of the JWIG project is to simplify development of complex Web services, compared to alternatives, such as, Servlets, JSP, ASP, and PHP. JWIG is a descendant of the <bigwig> research language.

Lava

Lava is a name unfortunately chosen for several unrelated software development languages/projects. So it doesn't appear as though BLFS has a preference for one over another, the project web sites are listed below, without descriptions of the capabilities or features for any of them.

Mercury

Mercury is a new logic/functional programming language, which combines the clarity and expressiveness of declarative programming with advanced static analysis and error detection features. Its highly optimized execution algorithm delivers efficiency far in excess of existing logic programming systems, and close to conventional programming systems. Mercury addresses the problems of large-scale program development, allowing modularity, separate compilation, and numerous optimization/time trade-offs.

Mono

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell, the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

MPD

MPD is a variant of the SR programming language. SR has a Pascal-like syntax and uses guarded commands for control statements. MPD has a C-like syntax and C-like control statements. However, the main components of the two languages are the same: resources, globals, operations, procs, procedures, processes, and virtual machines. Moreover, MPD supports the same variety of concurrent programming mechanisms as SR: co statements, semaphores, call/send/forward invocations, and receive and input statements.

Nemerle

Nemerle is a high-level statically-typed programming language for the .NET platform. It offers functional, object-oriented and imperative features. It has a simple C#-like syntax and a powerful meta-programming system. Features that come from the functional land are variants, pattern matching, type inference and parameter polymorphism (aka generics). The meta-programming system allows great compiler extensibility, embedding domain specific languages, partial evaluation and aspect-oriented programming.

Octave

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. Octave has extensive tools for solving common numerical linear algebra problems, finding the roots of nonlinear equations, integrating ordinary functions, manipulating polynomials, and integrating ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations. It is easily extensible and customizable via user-defined functions written in Octave's own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C++, C, Fortran, or other languages.

OO2C (Optimizing Oberon-2 Compiler)

OO2C is an Oberon-2 development platform. It consists of an optimizing compiler, a number of related tools, a set of standard library modules and a reference manual. Oberon-2 is a general-purpose programming language in the tradition of Pascal and Modula-2. Its most important features are block structure, modularity, separate compilation, static typing with strong type checking (also across module boundaries) and type extension with type-bound procedures. Type extension makes Oberon-2 an object-oriented language.

Ordered Graph Data Language (OGDL)

OGDL is a structured textual format that represents information in the form of graphs, where the nodes are strings and the arcs or edges are spaces or indentation.

Pike

Pike is a dynamic programming language with a syntax similar to Java and C. It is simple to learn, does not require long compilation passes and has powerful built-in data types allowing simple and really fast data manipulation. Pike is released under the GNU GPL, GNU LGPL and MPL.

Pyrex

Pyrex is a language specially designed for writing Python extension modules. It's designed to bridge the gap between the nice, high-level, easy-to-use world of Python and the messy, low-level world of C. Pyrex lets you write code that mixes Python and C data types any way you want, and compiles it into a C extension for Python.

Q

Q is a functional programming language based on term rewriting. Thus, a Q program or “script” is simply a collection of equations which are used to evaluate expressions in a symbolic fashion. The equations establish algebraic identities and are interpreted as rewriting rules in order to reduce expressions to “normal forms”.

R

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

Regina Rexx

Regina is a Rexx interpreter that has been ported to most Unix platforms (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc.) and also to OS/2, eCS, DOS, Win9x/Me/NT/2k/XP, Amiga, AROS, QNX4.x, QNX6.x BeOS, MacOS X, EPOC32, AtheOS, OpenVMS, SkyOS and OpenEdition. Rexx is a programming language that was designed to be easy to use for inexperienced programmers yet powerful enough for experienced users. It is also a language ideally suited as a macro language for other applications.

Small Device C Compiler (SDCC)

SDCC is a Freeware, retargetable, optimizing ANSI-C compiler that targets the Intel 8051, Maxim 80DS390 and the Zilog Z80 based MCUs. Work is in progress on supporting the Motorola 68HC08 as well as Microchip PIC16 and PIC18 series. The entire source code for the compiler is distributed under GPL.

SmartEiffel (The GNU Eiffel Compiler)

SmartEiffel claims to be “the fastest and the slimmest multi-platform Eiffel compiler on Earth”. Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language which emphasizes the production of robust software. Its syntax is keyword-oriented in the ALGOL and Pascal tradition. Eiffel is strongly statically typed, with automatic memory management (typically implemented by garbage collection). Distinguishing characteristics of Eiffel include Design by contract (DbC), liberal use of inheritance including multiple inheritance, a type system handling both value and reference semantics, and generic classes. Eiffel has a unified type system—all types in Eiffel are classes, so it is possible to create subclasses of the basic classes such as INTEGER. Eiffel has operator overloading, including the ability to define new operators, but does not have method overloading.

Squeak

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk, extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling, network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities, it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others), a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object and a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers efficient bulk-mutation of objects.

SR (Synchronizing Resources)

SR is a language for writing concurrent programs. The main language constructs are resources and operations. Resources encapsulate processes and variables they share; operations provide the primary mechanism for process interaction. SR provides a novel integration of the mechanisms for invoking and servicing operations. Consequently, all of local and remote procedure call, rendezvous, message passing, dynamic process creation, multicast, and semaphores are supported. SR also supports shared global variables and operations.

Standard ML

Standard ML is a safe, modular, strict, functional, polymorphic programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference, garbage collection, exception handling, immutable data types and updatable references, abstract data types, and parametric modules. It has efficient implementations and a formal definition with a proof of soundness. There are many implementations of Standard ML, among them:

Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)

SBCL is an open source (free software) compiler and runtime system for ANSI Common Lisp. It provides an interactive environment including an integrated native compiler, a debugger, and many extensions. SBCL runs on a number of platforms.

Tiny C Compiler (TCC)

Tiny C Compiler is a small C compiler that can be used to compile and execute C code everywhere, for example on rescue disks (about 100KB for x86 TCC executable, including C preprocessor, C compiler, assembler and linker). TCC is fast. It generates optimized x86 code, has no byte code overhead and compiles, assembles and links several times faster than GCC. TCC is versatile, any C dynamic library can be used directly. It is heading toward full ISOC99 compliance and can compile itself. The compiler is safe as it includes an optional memory and bound checker. Bound checked code can be mixed freely with standard code. TCC compiles and executes C source directly. No linking or assembly necessary. A full C preprocessor and GNU-like assembler is included. It is C script supported; just add “#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run” on the first line of your C source, and execute it directly from the command line. With libtcc, you can use TCC as a backend for dynamic code generation.

TinyCOBOL

TinyCOBOL is a COBOL compiler being developed by members of the free software community. The mission is to produce a COBOL compiler based on the COBOL 85 standards. TinyCOBOL is available for the Intel architecture (IA32) and compatible processors on the following platforms: BeOS, FreeBSD, Linux and MinGW on Windows.

Yorick

Yorick is an interpreted programming language, designed for postprocessing or steering large scientific simulation codes. Smaller scientific simulations or calculations, such as the flow past an airfoil or the motion of a drumhead, can be written as standalone yorick programs. The language features a compact syntax for many common array operations, so it processes large arrays of numbers very efficiently. Unlike most interpreters, which are several hundred times slower than compiled code for number crunching, Yorick can approach to within a factor of four or five of compiled speed for many common tasks. Superficially, Yorick code resembles C code, but Yorick variables are never explicitly declared and have a dynamic scoping similar to many Lisp dialects. The “unofficial” home page for Yorick can be found at http://www.maumae.net/yorick.

ZPL

ZPL is an array programming language designed from first principles for fast execution on both sequential and parallel computers. It provides a convenient high-level programming medium for supercomputers and large-scale clusters with efficiency comparable to hand-coded message passing. It is the perfect alternative to using a sequential language like C or Fortran and a message passing library like MPI.

Programming Libraries and Bindings

Byte Code Engineering Library (BCEL)

BECL is intended to give users a convenient possibility to analyze, create, and manipulate (binary) Java class files (those ending with .class). Classes are represented by objects which contain all the symbolic information of the given class: methods, fields and byte code instructions, in particular. Such objects can be read from an existing file, be transformed by a program (e.g., a class loader at run-time) and dumped to a file again. An even more interesting application is the creation of classes from scratch at run-time. The Byte Code Engineering Library may be also useful if you want to learn about the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the format of Java .class files. BCEL is already being used successfully in several projects such as compilers, optimizers, obfuscators, code generators and analysis tools.

Choco

Choco is a Java library for constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), constraint programming (CP) and explanation-based constraint solving (e-CP). It is built on a event-based propagation mechanism with backtrackable structures.

FFTW (Fastest Fourier Transform in the West)

FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e., the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST).

GOB (GObject Builder)

GOB (GOB2 anyway) is a preprocessor for making GObjects with inline C code so that generated files are not edited. Syntax is inspired by Java and Yacc or Lex. The implementation is intentionally kept simple, and no C actual code parsing is done.

GTK+/GNOME Language Bindings (wrappers)

GTK+/GNOME language bindings allow GTK+ to be used from other programming languages, in the style of those languages.

Java-GNOME

Java-GNOME is a set of Java bindings for the GNOME and GTK+ libraries that allow GNOME and GTK+ applications to be written in Java. The Java-GNOME API has been carefully designed to be easy to use, maintaining a good OO paradigm, yet still wrapping the entire functionality of the underlying libraries. Java-GNOME can be used with the Eclipse development environment and Glade user interface designer to create applications with ease.

gtk2-perl

gtk2-perl is the collective name for a set of Perl bindings for GTK+ 2.x and various related libraries. These modules make it easy to write GTK and GNOME applications using a natural, Perlish, object-oriented syntax.

KDE Language Bindings

KDE and most KDE applications are implemented using the C++ programming language, however there are number of bindings to other languages are available. These include scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby, and systems programming languages such as Java and C#.

Numerical Python (Numpy)

Numerical Python adds a fast array facility to the Python language.

Perl Scripts and Additional Modules

There are many Perl scripts and additional modules located on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) web site. Here you will find “All Things Perl”.

Integrated Development Environments

A-A-P

A-A-P makes it easy to locate, download, build and install software. It also supports browsing source code, developing programs, managing different versions and distribution of software and documentation. This means that A-A-P is useful both for users and for developers.

Anjuta

Anujuta is a versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C and C++ on GNU/Linux. It has been written for GTK/GNOME and features a number of advanced programming facilities. These include project management, application wizards, an on-board interactive debugger, and a powerful source editor with source browsing and syntax highlighting.

Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse contains many projects, including an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java.

Mozart

The Mozart Programming System is an advanced development platform for intelligent, distributed applications. Mozart is based on the Oz language, which supports declarative programming, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency as part of a coherent whole. For distribution, Mozart provides a true network transparent implementation with support for network awareness, openness, and fault tolerance. Security is upcoming. It is an ideal platform for both general-purpose distributed applications as well as for hard problems requiring sophisticated optimization and inferencing abilities.

Other Development Tools

cachecc1

cachecc1 is a GCC cache. It can be compared with the well known ccache package. It has some unique features including the use of an LD_PRELOADed shared object to catch invocations to cc1, cc1plus and as, it transparently supports all build methods, it can cache GCC bootstraps and it can be combined with distcc to transparently distribute compilations.

ccache

ccache is a compiler cache. It acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in 5 to 10 times faster speeds in common compilations.

DDD (GNU Data Display Debugger)

GNU DDD is a graphical front-end for command-line debuggers such as GDB, DBX, WDB, Ladebug, JDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, the Bash debugger, or the Python debugger. Besides “usual” front-end features such as viewing source texts, DDD has an interactive graphical data display, where data structures are displayed as graphs..

distcc

distcc is a program to distribute builds of C, C++, Objective C or Objective C++ code across several machines on a network. distcc should always generate the same results as a local build, is simple to install and use, and is usually much faster than a local compile. distcc does not require all machines to share a filesystem, have synchronized clocks, or to have the same libraries or header files installed. They can even have different processors or operating systems, if cross-compilers are installed.

Exuberant Ctags

Exuberant Ctags generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files that allows these items to be quickly and easily located by a text editor or other utility. A tag signifies a language object for which an index entry is available (or, alternatively, the index entry created for that object). Tag generation is supported for the following languages: Assembler, AWK, ASP, BETA, Bourne/Korn/Zsh Shell, C, C++, COBOL, Eiffel, Fortran, Java, Lisp, Lua, Make, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, REXX, Ruby, S-Lang, Scheme, Tcl, Vim, and YACC. A list of editors and tools utilizing tag files may be found at http://ctags.sourceforge.net/tools.html.

gocache (GNU Object Cache)

ccache is a clone of ccache, with the goal of supporting compilers other than GCC and adding additional features. Embedded compilers will especially be in focus.

OProfile

OProfile is a system-wide profiler for Linux systems, capable of profiling all running code at low overhead. OProfile is released under the GNU GPL. It consists of a kernel driver and a daemon for collecting sample data, and several post-profiling tools for turning data into information. OProfile leverages the hardware performance counters of the CPU to enable profiling of a wide variety of interesting statistics, which can also be used for basic time-spent profiling. All code is profiled: hardware and software interrupt handlers, kernel modules, the kernel, shared libraries, and applications. OProfile is currently in alpha status; however it has proven stable over a large number of differing configurations. It is being used on machines ranging from laptops to 16-way NUMA-Q boxes.

strace

strace is a system call tracer, i.e., a debugging tool which prints out a trace of all the system calls made by another process or program.

Last updated on 2016-09-18 23:17:50 -0700