Why a good platform can't be free

I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.

In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.

You know, I have no problem with that. As I've stated in the past, complex algorithms are hard to get right and multimedia is complex to get good quality results. And I don't blame the creators of this work wanting to get something out of it. If they didn't, they probably wouldn't have created it to begin with and we'd be waiting for some kind soul to donate this for free. Wishful thinking I'd think.

But you know, the costs aren't that bad. One I was looking at was the DVD format licensing. There is a company in Japan that controls this and their pricing information is here. It's about $5K for the book (under NDA), $15K for the license, then another $10K or so for verification. That's not too bad if you're selling thousands of units. But it's also not zero. And the NDA also prevents the implementation from being open source to begin with anyway.

And there are similar fees for the very popular MP3, (minimum $15K). Blu-ray is similar. And some of these are yearly fees. So as you can see, if you want to produce a multimedia platform you can redistribute, the costs are non-zero. So why do people expect these platforms to cost zero...

BMW wants to go open

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

That would be quite a twist from the current proprietary mindset that these guys have today, and I'm not sure they are ready for the co-opetition this would take. Of course, we're pretty used to it at Eclipse where platform vendors fighting in this space work together on open source tools. That's fine, since that isn't our core competency and we're building a much better IDE together than we could independently. But that's where we draw the line.

Ian concluded his blog entry by inviting BMW to the Automotive Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe (I am looking forward to ESE as well!) But this brings up a sore point that we often talk about but one that seems impossible to solve. If they want the software stack to be completely open like Android, then they aren't doing it at Eclipse. The Eclipse Board forbids GPL code within it's walls. But I would think such a stack really could only be done on Linux and that's a non starter. You could look at Symbian which will be EPL in the next few years, but I'm not sure Symbian is the right choice for this, especially if they want to link up with Android.

And this bugs me to no end. We are seeing some serious investment happening in open source platforms, the whole platform. The culture of commercial co-operation on open platforms at Eclipse makes it a natural to host such endeavors, which in turn would raise its profile immensely in the embedded and mobile community. Too bad the Eclipse Board shoots itself in the foot on this.

Fun with RSE

I love my home office setup. I still have an @work office that I go to, but with an Autistic son who's home schooled, I never know when I need to work at home for a day or two so it's good to have something setup so I can continue working when I do. In the office, I have a TV which I'm using to watch the great baseball playoffs happening right now and I'll watch hockey whenever I get the chance too. And while doing that, I get to play on my laptop, like writing here in this blog.

At any rate, tonight I thought I'd try hooking together the virtual machines running in my Windows environment. One is qemu running my simulated OpenConsole thing to which I'll be adding OpenGL support. The other is VirtualBox running a desktop version running the same distro, i.e. Debian, where I'll be building the device driver and app prototypes. VirtualBox has nicer desktop control than plain qemu.

The question comes: how do I get the stuff I'm building on the dev machine to the target. I thought of NFS, which is probably the best choice, but I'd need to spend time figuring out how to set up NFS for this. Instead, I thought I'd try an Eclipse solution, the Remote System Explorer, and hook up everything using SSH.

First, I had to redirect a port on my laptop towards the qemu SSH port 22. The qemu option '-redir tcp:2222::22' did nicely there and I was able to use it to log into my qemu using PUTTY on my laptop. I also decided to forward another port, 2345 to the same port on qemu to allow gdb on my dev machine to talk to a gdbserver on the target using that port.

I then set up the SSH connection in RSE on the dev machine. I used the 'router' address so that the dev machine would connect to Windows on my laptop, which then forwarded the SSH connection to qemu. It was tricky to figure out how to set the port number to 2222 instead of 22, but I found it and it worked like a charm. I used the Terminal view to log into the qemu session from VirtualBox. Cool!

I then tried the C/C++ Remote Launch feature that uses the RSE connection to download and launch into the CDT debugger. When I first tried, the executable on the target didn't have the execute permission set, but once I fixed that, the debugger launched fine. Very cool.

Apart from being fun and interesting, this OpenConsole thing is giving me some real experience on using Eclipse tools to do embedded development with Linux and exercise all that it offers. I am very pleased with it and I think we really need to get the word out how well it does, like a Webinar or something :)

BTW, Go Rays!

Open Console you say

Linux powers "cloud" gaming console.

More info here.

I hate the term cloud, but this is close to the internet appliance/open gaming console I have been thinking about. Specs are damn close too. Although I'm not sure the ATI HD 3200 class graphics (I assume it's the 780G chipset) will do a good job at the games. But it's good to see someone with money came up with a similar idea and has made this concept a reality, or at least is marketing it.

Update

Looking closer to the EVO website, this thing isn't as open as I was thinking. Game developers have to sign and NDA to get the SDK. Odd. They do mention proprietary features that are only in their version of the Linux. What I had more in mind was an open distro that ran on specific hardware specs, but was truly open. Looking at the games they have listed on their web site, they are all open as well that can run on any Linux distro that has OpenGL support and drivers. You don't need to be proprietary...

Windows as a host for Linux development?

Here's something I'm trying to decide as I work through the ultimate development environment for a Linux based "OpenConsole" (and to be clear, I'm talking about set top box class consoles, not mobile). As I mentioned in previous blog entries, I've figured out how to extend qemu to do OpenGL calls on the host and present a PCI interface to the guest to make those calls. All I need is a Linux driver and user space library to use that interface and present the OpenGL (or OpenGL ES) interface to applications that can do games, or what have you.

I figure Linux is a natural host development environment for the device driver. You need to reuse the kernel build system to build it and from what I understand, that build system doesn't work on Windows, not even with Cygwin. So that's a lock, and I can use the Linux version of CDT to build it.

But when it comes to applications, I am wondering how many developers would prefer to use Windows as their development host. From what I understand (again, and I keep guessing here), most game development is done on Windows, even when targeting the "closed" consoles. Actually, XBOX development is obviously done on Windows. But I believe the others have Windows hosted SDKs and tools as well.

However, as with device drivers, Linux should be an obvious choice for application development targeting Linux. This is especially true when targeting PC-type platforms since the host tool chain can actually be used to target the console, and even more true when you're actually using the same run-time lineup.

I get the feeling that there's more to life than writing your Linux targeted application. If, as the developer, you're still relying on a lot of Windows tools or you just plain prefer Windows as a work environment, you would probably want to write your application on Windows as well.

It's funny how we sometimes forget history and the fact that we abandoned our Unix environments for Windows because it had much better tools. And as I (and many others) have discussed, Linux hasn't caught up yet to make us want to go back. So I firmly believe that Windows is an expected host development environment for Linux development, especially embedded. And with the help of gcc's cross compilation abililty and the gcc support in the CDT, it's shouldn't be that hard to put together.

It's all about the Stack

Someone recently pointed me to a presentation that Tim Sweeney (Mr. Unreal engine) from Epic Games gave at POPL (Principles of Programming Languages) 2006. The focus of the presentation was on "The Next Mainstream Programming Language" where he discussed the challenges game developers have with performance and quality and what the next generation language needs to have to help with their problems. I truly believe game developers are at the forefront of software engineering and have the heaviest requirement set for IDEs. And that's why I'm trying to figure out how they work.

Tim's slides talk about the technologies that went into the game "Gears of War" and it's a very interesting mix. While the bulk of the code is C++, there is extensive use of scripting languages as well. And, of course, most modern games make extensive use of Shading languages to manipulate vertices and pixels using the almost teraflop class GPUs we have today. So they could really benefit from an IDE that did more than just C++ or more than just scripting while integrating shader development into the fold.

The other interesting point I got out of Tim's slides was the breadth of software libraries that they were using - DirectX for 3D graphics, OpenAL for sound, Ogg Vorbis for music, wxWidgets for 2D widgets, Zlib for compression, and the list goes on. Apparently they used a mix of 20 libraries to build Gears of War. And it only makes sense as the quality of the software components out there removes any need to build the same functionality yourself.

And I think this is another area where IDEs could improve on, integration of SDKs and automatic setup of build and indexing environments. We do a bit of that in the CDT, at least on the indexing front. And it is something we've talked about on the Build side but we've never really come up with a generic mechanism that would allow you to add SDKs to a project.

Building an IDE to help game developers be more productive would be beneficial to all users of the IDE as I think all developers run into these issues. Maybe not to the same scale but I can see how everyone would benefit from multi-language and software component management support. And, of course, I can't see a better platform to build this other than Eclipse. If we look hard, we'll see that we have lot of this already.

On the Future of C++

There's been talk for a number of years now on the decline of C++ and the rise of virtual machine and scripting language. But certainly from where I sit, the C/C++ community is still very strong. In fact, I still see many more C applications than C++, especially in the Linux and embedded worlds. Though, everyone agrees, for large applications, doing them in C++ instead of C makes sense.

But I have to admit, for desktop applications, I'm not sure C++ is the right answer like it was in the 1990's. We're certainly seeing Java, with the help of Eclipse, and C# on the .Net side, take a much bigger chunk of the pie chart. And I think that's the right approach. The richness of these environments naturally enables a developer to be much more productive than in the C++ world, especially when dealing with the user via graphical interfaces. I'm pretty much ready to concede this space to those languages. Sad, but true.

But there are a few areas where I don't think C or C++ will every go away. And that's the areas where the developer has the need for speed and where they want to work close to and take advantage of the native processing hardware underneath their application. I often hear from people who would know, that modern Java VMs can actually do better than C/C++ in performance, thanks to run-time optimizations. But projects like LLVM which provides similar optimizations to native applications, may balance the scale there. And at any rate, out of the box, native applications will start with the better performance.

When your writing a high performance application, like 3D gaming, or scientific simulations, or if your working on mobile applications where you need to balance CPU cycles versus battery life, C/C++ will always be the obvious choice. There may be exceptions to the rule, and Microsoft with .Net Compact and OSGi for Java are trying to make a splash, but C/C++ will be difficult to replace.

OpenGL 3.0 or OpenGL ES 2.0?

First, I have to admit, I'm a newbie at this whole 3D programming world. I watch from a far with a lot of interest but no real experience working in that world. So I apologize ahead of time if this is a stupid question. But I know a lot of CDT users are using the CDT to work with 3D graphic APIs and game engines so I thought I'd bounce this off you.

It was interesting to watch the response to the release of the latest major version of the OpenGL spec. The reception from the game development community was especially interesting. They were furious, at least according to Slashdot. But I can see disappointment in other articles I've read. The question came up: do we declare Microsoft the victor in the OpenGL versus DirectX wars? To which I add, does this spell the end of the dream of gaming on Linux?

From what I gather, there were a couple of issues with the OpenGL 3.0 release. One, the group writing the spec disappeared behind closed doors and sprung it on the world when they were done without really getting the ordinary game developer's input. And in the end, it appears a lot of compromises were made to keep the non-game developer, the big CAD companies from what I hear, happy. So despite discussion of big architectural changes to compete with DirectX, it ends up not even worthy of the major version number.

It highlights the problem of trying to be everything for everyone and how that is impossible in many situations. Maybe the game developers need a special version of OpenGL spec'ed out just for them. If not, they're all jumping on the DirectX bandwagon and see you later.

But that got me taking another look at OpenGL ES, the OpenGL APIs reduced for embedded applications and gaining wide acceptance in the smartphone market. It was interesting to see that the Playstation 3 uses ES as one of it's available 3D APIs. And reading a few forums I've seen comments from experts who think OpenGL ES, at least the 2.0 version centralized around shaders, is OpenGL done right. The drivers are a lot easier to write and the API cuts out almost all the duplication and focuses on efficiency. It does make one think.

For the future of Linux gaming then, should we be looking to OpenGL ES? I don't know how many OpenGL experts read this blog but I'd be interested to hear your comments on this. I recently bought a book on OpenGL ES programming to see what it was all about and it started to make sense to me that maybe this is the right direction. Heck, it almost seems like Khronos's master plan...

What would I do without CDT

While waiting for my VOBs to sync from Salburg to Ottawa, I thought I'd poke around qemu to figure out exactly what I would need to do to add a PCI device. Apparently, there's very little, if any, documentation on how to do that. And I even saw one response to a similar query that told the guy to go look at the source. So I did.

I started by grabing the source for the latest qemu release 0.9.1. I created a CDT Makefile project and untared the release into the project directory. I created an External Tool to run configure with the options I wanted and then I did a project build which ran the resulting makefiles. So far so good. Looking at the Includes folder on the project, I see it caught the mingw gcc standard headers as well as my project as an include path.

So off I went. First I looked for things beginning with pc_ in the Open Element dialog (Shift-Ctrl-t). There I found the pc init code and went looking there for PCI devices. I found the LSI SCSI device init and hit F3 to go look at the implementation. There I started seeing some generic PCI type things. To see what other PCI devices I could look at, I selected the call to register a PCI I/O region and did a search for references. In the Search results view I quickly saw other PCI devices - VGA displays, the IDE device, some networking things, USB. All good examples.

It wasn't long before I figured out what I needed to do. It got me thinking. How did I ever do this before the CDT and how are the poor guys still stuck in the command line world doing stuff like this. I guess I used to do the same thing but used grep which does simple text searches. But there's no way I could do the same navigation with the same speed. And things like Alt left and right arrow to go back and forth along my path doesn't happen in that environment.

No, CDT rocks. I hear a lot lately about how there are still many people hesitant to leave the safety and comfort of the command line world. I think that's too bad. They're missing out on some real productivity gains.

QEMU Manager

Shh, I'm supposed to be working, don't tell my boss ;)

I wrote in a previous entry about the VirtualBox SDK, and the potential for using that SDK to add 3d graphics support. I was pretty excited. All I needed to do was create a DLL that could be loaded into the VirtualBox I used for running Linux on my Windows laptop. Well, I tried a simple example, but could never get the DLL to load. Looking at the source code for VirtualBox, I noticed that there's a "hardened" mode for building it. For security, it prevents rogue DLLs from getting loaded. I guess my DLL looked pretty rogue :(. And the complexity of building VirtualBox myself scared me off.

I've also been a pretty big fan of the Qemu emulator, especially for emulating mobile devices. But you can use it for emulating a PC and there is an accelerator driver that apparently makes it fast. So I guess I could give that a try. I've mucked around in the qemu source in the past and I have an idea on how to add a device. It's not as clean as the VirtualBox SDK promised, but it could be done.

Along the way, I found Qemu Manager, a nice GUI that manages virtual machines and launching them on Windows. Very cool. And it's extensible so that if a new version, or a cleverly hacked version, of qemu comes out, you can have it manage launches for them as well.

So this weeks "Open Source Tools Kudos" go to David Reynolds for building the Qemu Manager. Very cool and thanks!

Another Awesome CDT Summit

I just realize I haven't blogged about our CDT Summit last week. Shame on me, because it was a great three days. It was smaller than previous summits, only 16 people. But this time, we didn't have the guys there that were just lurking in person. Everyone was there representing real Eclipse contributions. So we ended up getting a lot of real work done.

We started on the first day by updating eachother on what we were planning for the next release, Galileo, which we determined by the end of the week will be CDT 6.0. It's much more of a marketing number since I don't anticipate huge API changes, but there will be some, especially in the build area.

We then talked a lot about development process and how we can improve the way we work on the CDT. It's a challenge since many of us are only part time on the CDT. But we all agreed that becoming more formal in the way we do things is necessary and we have plans on doing just that.

The next day we broke up into two groups to do some deep dives into specific areas. One group dove deep into indexer issues. They talked a lot about some of the tougher areas that the CDT index and parsing technologies need to deal with, like C++ templates. The biggest new thing from them was discussion on how to represent inactive code, i.e. code that is ifdef'ed out given the current configuration. They settled on starting with doing so in the Outline View at least. Any more is a research activity.

The other group talked about debug. The biggest move there is the integration of the Debug Service Framework from the Device Debugging project into the CDT. I anticipate DSF will be the future standard debugger integration point for the CDT, and maybe even for the Platform. At the same time we will continue to support our existing CDT Debugging Interface (CDI) integrators. I'm also excited about the potential disassembly debugging editor that should hopefully make it easier to look at the object code being debugged.

On the last day we talked about e4 resources and the start of my straw man proposal I have put together. We also talked about the CDT build system, and in particular, the CDT project model that serves as the common model for them all. We've unfortunately lost the main developer of this work before it finished and we need to take another look at it and hopefully simplify it. It's a good lesson that you shouldn't be hands off if you totally depend on an open source component. The people working on that component may vanish and you have no way of getting fixes in.

I really wasn't sure what to expect from this year's summit. In many ways, the CDT is feature complete. And the plan will show that. But we still have a lot of usability and quality issues to address and the team is committed to focusing on that this year. And that will help solidify the CDT's place on the developers desktop. And that was exemplified by Red Hat's presence there. They are committed to making Eclipse the Visual Studio for Linux development. And that's a good place to be.

A cool multi-platform CDT use case

I previously blogged about the VitualBox SDK and the capability it provides to build some really interesting emulation environments, 3D graphics being the one I'm most interested in at the moment. And this is something I'm seeing in the embedded industry a lot lately. Hardware is expensive. These boxes we have on our desks are very powerful and relatively pretty cheap. Being able to emulate hardware during the software development phase of a project gives the developer the ability to get his code up and running much earlier.

So looking at how I'd build an emulator for a Linux set-top box that had 3d graphic capabilities, it quickly became apparent again how the multi-platform capabilities of the CDT gives me an top class C/C++ IDE to do work on all of the components. Here's what they would include:

• The 3D graphics emulator is a shared library that VirtualBox loads and, of course, runs on the host. I would start with doing it on Windows since that's my main environment. I'd use either MinGW gcc or the Visual C++ compiler. CDT has support for building both but only debugging with gcc at the moment. But shared library debugging on Windows has always been trouble with the CDT so that might not be important. In the long run, I'd probably also want to do this for a Linux host environment.


• The box would run Linux, of course. I'd need to be able to build the drivers that talk to the emulated 3d graphics thing. And I'd need to be able to build a bootable image with the kernel and the drivers and any core utilities I would need. Again CDT comes to the rescue, but I'd probably pick a commercialized version that automates Linux kernel development such as Wind River's Linux platform builder. And I'd have to use my Ubuntu development environment on VirtualBox to run it since Linux is the only environment that really supports building the Linux kernel.


• For the actual user space programs that provide the content, I can use the CDT again. This is the main environment that is used by the community building stuff for the box. gcc's great cross compilation support makes it less obvious whether you'd do this on Windows or Linux. Linux would be a favorite since you can easily share your development workspace with the target using NFS. Something not as easy on Windows.

For me, this is the big advantage of the CDT. You have yourself doing host and target development on Windows and Linux, and even Mac if you wanted to, all using the same tools that have the same UI and keyboard shortcuts. Now, where's that cloning machine so I can actually go build this thing...

Another legend has eyes on the future

I just finished reading an interview with another legend of the game programming industry, Epic's Tim Sweeney (Mr. Unreal). First it was John Carmack from id (Mr. Doom) wondering how game developers will be able to harness multi-core technologies to improve game performance. Now I see Tim has a very interesting vision for how these technologies are going to change the industry.

It looks like both of them agree, multi-core general purpose processors will make graphics specific processing units obsolete, at least the fixed function parts of those graphics processors. But Tim seems to have a grasp of what that environment will look like. And it's both exciting and liberating.

Essentially, he sees the return of software rendering, just like we had before the 3d hardware accelerator industry kicked in. Software rendering gives game programmers the freedom to implement whatever algorithms suite their needs, and they aren't tied to the DirectX and OpenGL APIs which Tim says is really tying their hands. They can create whatever data structures they need to represent a scene and do whatever they want to slash that scene onto the pixels.

And he sees building that future with general programming languages and C++ in particular, instead of custom, hardware specific languages. Using C++, you have a shot at simplifying the programmers life, using the same technology for everything compute intensive. Game algorithms essentially come down to doing as many floating point operations at the same time as you can. Of course, this can be done in C++ with the right libraries, or even if necessary, a good compiler that can optimize your code to take advantage of whatever vectorizing capabilities your hardware has.

I anticipate this will be an exciting time for game engine developers. Certainly Tim seems pretty excited about it (and I highly recommend reading this article to catch some of that excitement.) And the good news is that we don't need to invent new technologies to make it happen. C++ will do just fine (with a little help of the CDT, of course ;)

VirtualBox 2.0 gains an SDK

When you're an Eclipse developer like I am who is taking advantage of Eclipse's cross-platform capabilities, you need to have a bunch of platforms to test your work on. The incredible growth of virtualization on the desktop over recent years has been a huge help for us who don't necessarily want their offices filled with a dozen machines.

I've tried them all and settled on VirtualBox, which was recently bought by Sun, as my Windows Laptop solution (I use KVM on my Linux desktop box). It has the best handling of screen resizing I've seen and thanks to the great support for this in recent Linux distros, the window for the VM flows nicely into my daily workflow.

VirtualBox released their 2.0 version last week. The big news is support for 64-bit hosts and guests (yeah, old news for other solutions, especially given VirtualBox still doesn't support SMP :( ). But what caught my eye was that extra download labeled 'SDK'. Nothing get's me more excited than an extensible platform (well, there are some things...). So I was quick to unwrap their new gift.

The SDK mainly covers APIs they've exposed to build VM management tools, similar to libvirt that's used on Linux platforms. It lets you create, configure, and launch VMs. Cool, and maybe it'll lead to better UIs for this, mind you the one they have is already pretty good.

The more interesting part of this was the last chapter of the SDKRef PDF file. It talks about the mechanism they use to allow communication between the guest operating system and the host. It allows you to create your own drivers that communicate through a virtual PCI device to a shared library on the host. Now the header files weren't shipped as part of the SDK, but they are part of the open source parts of VirtualBox. At least the doc shows you how. Very cool.

Now this comes to one of the most pressing things I wished virtualization could do, use the 3D graphic chips on the host. If I want to experiment with some of the ideas I have for 3D Linux UI frameworks, and still use Windows for my day job, I need something like that. And with this capability opened up for us to use, I can quickly imagine how I could get OpenGL calls from a guest OS out through this mechanism to the host OpenGL libraries. And I guess I'm not alone. In the list of built-in users of this mechanism is a mysterious service called VBoxSharedOpenGL.

Time ripe for a Linux console?

I was watching my son the other day on our XBOX 360 that's tucked nicely in our cabinet under the TV with our DVD player, digital cable box, and receiver. He was playing Halo 3, which looks great on our LCD HDTV, BTW. He'd break out once in a while and go back to the Dashboard and send a text message to a buddy then go back into the game and use the headset connected to his controller to talk about his school day with another buddy he was shooting at. It's incredible how far consoles have come from the old Atari boxes we had when we were kids. Now they're these multi-processing entertainment centers and communication devices that hook our kids up to the rest of the world.

It's also interesting how he's migrated away from our PC over to the XBOX. That could be because our PC is getting old and the 360 is actually a more powerful machine. But, still there are still things you can't do on it. That would probably be solved if it had a web browser built into it. But for some reason, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, there doesn't seem to be a web browser available for the 360. Weird. Too bad this is a closed platform that makes it really hard to get open source software, like the Webkit browser engine, ported to it.

So that got me thinking in the context of Linux. Why isn't there a Linux console? Linux is slowly getting better for the desktop and it's about to break out huge in the mobile space, wouldn't it also work well in a box I can put under my TV and use with a wireless keyboard, or game controller with a headset, or with the controllers we have for Guitar Hero and Rock Band? I don't see why not.

Googling the idea, you see the GP2X WIZ handheld I've blogged about in the past, and the sad story that was Indrema that rose with the hype of Linux in 2000 and crashed with the market realities of 2001. And yeah, Linux probably wasn't ready in 2000. But nothing seems to be happening now.

And I'm sure there are economic roadblocks to making it happen. The companies in this industry are huge and are still selling the boxes for less than it costs to build them. Having an open platform makes it pretty difficult to collect the license fees that subsidize the hardware and platform development costs. You'd need a big player with big friends, similar to one of the Linux handheld alliances, to even think of making this happen.

But if it works for handhelds, why not on the TV. At least there it would have a bigger screen...

Get out your lambdas - C++0x

I saw a video of a talk by Bjorn Stroustrup, Mr. C++, who people I work with know I call "Barney", affectionately, of course. In the video, he mentioned how badly he wanted to keep the name of the next major version of the C++ standard as C++0x and not have it slip into the next decade. Well, 2008 is almost over so it's going to have to be C++09 if it's to make it. But they are trying hard and making some progress.

And hopefully it does. C++ is due for a good shot in the arm, something to get people excited about. Working every day in Java as I do, and yearning for my C++ days, there are a few features in Java that would be exciting to have in C++. Not many, but there are a few :).

And one of them appears to be ready to be included in the standard, lambda expressions. Now Java doesn't have pure lambda expressions, but the inner class support comes close. And with C++0x support for more general lambda expressions, I think we have a winner on our hands. Here's an example:

int x;
calculateWithCallback([&x](int y) { x = y; });

This ain't your father's C++. To explain what's happening, we're passing an anonymous function that takes a parameter y, and we pass along with it a closure which passes on some of the context with the function, in this case a reference to x. Later on the calculateWithCallback function does something and then calls our function with a parameter value for y. We then execute and assign the value to our x and return.

Anyway, very cool. Callbacks is a very popular design pattern and we use it all the time when programming Eclipse plug-ins. Being able to do something like this in a concise manner in C++ will be very useful and help bring C++ into a new decade, or whenever they get the standard ratified.

exit() is your friend

I was just reading the Google Chrome cartoon book (an interesting way of presenting designs). One of the things they talked about was how having browser tabs in separate process helps with memory consumption because memory gets cleaned up with the process exits. Otherwise, the constant malloc/free cycle ends up with memory fragmentation that is hard to get rid of.

That brought back some memories. In my early work on a code generator, I used the same philosophy. I created a pretty big object model in memory after I parsed the input, but I never implemented any of the destructors and never called delete. Didn't need to. It was a short lived process and the call to exit() at the end freed up all the memory anyway. And it's pretty fast! Lot faster than calling delete for each object I created.

Anyway that worked great. Until another team decided they liked my object model and wanted to use it in the main tool. Unfortunately that tool was a long running process and they had to add in the memory management to survive. So much for exit() is your friend. Worked for me, though.

Of course all the garbage collector languages deal with this for you. Makes me wonder why GC in C++ hasn't become more popular. There are C++ garbage collectors like the one from Hans Boehm. But I guess if you're moving to that paradigm, you might as well use Java.

Coming Live from Google Chrome

Well, it's live and I've downloaded it and am using it to write this blog entry. It's Google Chrome. It's a beta, but from what I've seen in the couple of minutes I've used it, it's delivering as promised. Very fast and smooth, even typing here. Better than Firefox? Seems like it, but maybe it's the chrome blinding me. And given the news volume about it, there's a lot of people speculating about what Google is trying to accomplish with this thing.

At any rate, if it is about making the Web the OS as we've been trying to do for centuries now, what does it mean to C++ application developers? How do they make their applications relevant in this new world? Is it all over? Do we throw away our C++ compilers and pick up a book on PHP?

I strongly believe there will always be a role for a close to the silicon programming language like C++. Whether it's for resource constrained devices like mobile platforms, or whether it's for high performance apps like image processing or simulations, there's still that need.

What may change is how these C++ apps communicate with the user. I can easily imagine a Web-based UI for C++ apps, similar to other Web 2.0 platforms. Who says the server side needs to be Java or PHP? It could easily be a C++ app. What we need, though, is a clean way to program such a UI. C++ widget programming has always been a challenge, but wait until you change the paradigm like this.

This is one reason I'm keeping an eye on the "Webification of SWT" part of the Eclipse e4 project. The lessons learned and the technology choices made there should be portable to a similar effort in C++. Maybe there's already a C++ widget set out there that we could use to start, like wxWidgets, maybe something else, maybe something new. Either way, it's time for C++ developers to start thinking about what this all means to them.

Google has their own browser!???

Apparently the word leaked on an unofficial Google blog site and they followed up with an "oops" official blog post. Either way, the word is out and the web browser "industry" is in for a shake up. Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. Apparently it includes pieces from Webkit (I'm guessing the browser part) and Firefox (I'm guessing the chrome part) and will be developed as an open source project.

The first beta will be released tomorrow (Tuesday). I've heard rumors but always dismissed them. Why would they do that when we have a handful of pretty good browsers already. I guess the rumors were true and given the beta comes out now, it's been in the works for a while.

But still, you've got to ask why. Why couldn't they just contribute the stuff the felt was important to Firefox or Webkit. I'm going to guess that it's because sometimes getting your ideas into an open source project is hard. Everyone with a few open source miles under their belt knows how hard it is to influence a community at times and this isn't exactly the first fork in the industry. And when you have the resources and experience Google has, I guess it made more sense for them to fork.

My favorite quote is from the cnet news article where I first stumbled on the news: "Open sourcing the code is a smart way to avoid the 'Google wants to take over the world' fear, but it seems that Google has ambitions to create a comprehensive Internet operating system, including a browser, applications, middleware and cloud infrastructure."

Very intriguing. And this is one of the reasons I'm very interested in Android. Because that's what it is, an internet operating system for mobile. It isn't much of a stretch to take it beyond the cell phone so it'll be very interesting to watch where this goes. (And, yeah, I think Microsoft should be paying attention to this.)

Where's Wascana 1.0?

For those who haven't heard of Wascana, it's a lake in the center of my birthplace, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It's a beautiful oasis in the middle of the bald Canadian prairies and my last trip there inspired me to name my Eclipse CDT distribution for Windows desktop programming after it.

Around this time last year I realized that school was about to start and I rushed out the first release of Wascana 0.9.3. To date I've had almost 9,000 downloads of it showing me that there is interest and a need out there for such a package.

My plan was to get Wascana 1.0 ready for this school year. But my summer has been very busy and I haven't had a chance to work on it. But hear me now and believe me later (I'm sure that was in an old Saturday Night Live sketch somewhere), it is still on my roadmap. For one thing, I really want to make it a showcase for the Eclipse p2 provisioning system showing how you can build a feature rich install and update environment for your whole IDE, not just the Eclipse bits.

Aside from that I want to add the boost C++ libraries to the package. Boost is a very full C++ template library that gives you a lot of the library functionality that makes Java so good, and it's often a showcase for new technologies that end up in the C++ standard anyway.

I'm also waiting for an official release of gcc 4.3.1 for MinGW, to give us the latest and greatest compiler technology from GNU with super good optimization and support for OpenMP for parallel programming. There's also the newest gdb debugger that gives pending breakpoint support so we can get rid of a lot of the kludges we had to put in place to support this kind of thing in the CDT. Unfortunately, Windows debugging for MSVC support isn't as complete as I'd hoped, but there has been progress as part of the Target Communication Framework (TCF) work at Eclipse, so we will get there sooner or later.

And, of course, there's Ganymede, including the latest CDT 5.0.1 which will be coming out with the Ganymede SR1 in a couple of weeks. CDT had some really awesome improvements, including new refactoring support, in the 5.0 stream.

So for those waiting, I'm glad your a patient bunch. The wait will be worth it for this critical piece of my continuing effort to get the grassroots C++ programmers and hobbyists, many of whom are working on Windows, into the Eclipse world.