After a year and a half, we have finally released Mono 3.0.
Like I discussed last year, we will be moving to a more nimble release process with Mono 3.0. We are trying to reduce our inventory of pending work and get new features to everyone faster. This means that our "master" branch will remain stable from now on, and that large projects will instead be developed in branches that are regularly landed into our master branch.
Check our release notes for the full details of this release. But here are some tasty bits:
Also, expect F# 3.0 to be bundled in our OSX distribution.
Posted on 22 Oct 2012
Let me share with you some links that I found interesting in the past few weeks. These should keep the most diligent person busy for a few hours.
Talbot Crowell's Introduction to F# 3.0 slides from Boston CodeCamp.
Bertrand Meyer (The creator of Eiffel, father of good taste in engineering practices) writes Fundamental Duality of Software Engineering: on the specifications and tests. This is one of those essays where every idea is beautifully presented. A must read.
Good article on weakly ordered CPUs.
MonkeySpace slide deck on MonoGame.
David Siegel shares a cool C# trick, switch expressions.
Oak: Frictionless development for ASP.NET MVC.
Simon Peyton Jones on video talks about Haskell, past, present and future. A very tasty introductory talk to the language. David Siegel says about this:
Simon Peyton-Jones is the most eloquent speaker on programming languages. Brilliant, funny, humble, adorable.
Rob Pike's talk on Concurrency is not Parallelism. Rob is one of the crisper minds in software development, anything he writes, you must read, everything he says, you must listen to.
Answering the question of what is the fastest way to access properties dynamically: DynamicMethod LINQ expressions, MethodInfo. Discussion with Eric Maupin.
OpenGL ES Quick Reference Card, plus a good companion: Apple's Programming Guide.
SparkleShare, the open source file syncing service running on top of Git released their feature-complete product. They are preparing for their 1.0 release. SparkleShare runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Check out their Release Notes.
Experts warn that Canonical might likely distribute a patched version that modifies your documents and spreadhseets to include ads and Amazon referal links.
Pheed a twitter competitor with a twist.
Better debugging tools for Google Native Client.
Touch Draw comes to MacOS, great vector drawing application for OSX. Good companion to Pixelmator and great for maintaining iOS artwork. It has great support for structured graphics and for importing/exporting Visio files.
MonoGame 3D on the Raspberry Pi video.
Fruit Rocks a fun little game for iOS.
@Redth, the one man factory of cool hacks has released:
Coding on Passbook: Lessons Learned.
Phil Haack blogs about MonkeySpace
Patrick McKenzie writes Designing First Run Experiences to Delight Users.
Kicking the Twitter habit.
Twitter Q&A with TJ Fixman, writer for Insomniac Games.
Debunking the myths of budget deficits: Children and Grandchildren do not pay for budget deficits, they get interest on the bonds.
Live updates on HoneyPots setup by the HoneyNet Project.
Updated Programming F# 3.0, 2nd Edition is out. By Chris Smith, a delightful book on F# has been updated to cover the new and amazing type providers in F#.
ServiceStack now has 113 contributors.
From Apple Insider: Google may settle mobile FRAND patent antitrust claim.
The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board endorses Obama over Romney:
In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.
From Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala the author looks at the differences in policies in red vs blue states, and concludes:
Advocates for the red-state approach to government invoke lofty principles: By resisting federal programs and defying federal laws, they say, they are standing up for liberty. These were the same arguments that the original red-staters made in the 1800s, before the Civil War, and in the 1900s, before the Civil Rights movement. Now, as then, the liberty the red states seek is the liberty to let a whole class of citizens suffer. That’s not something the rest of us should tolerate. This country has room for different approaches to policy. It doesn’t have room for different standards of human decency.
Esquire's take on the 2nd Presidential Debate.
Dave Winer wrote Readings from News Execs:
There was an interesting juxtaposition. Rupert Murdoch giving a mercifully short speech saying the biggest mistake someone in the news business could make is thinking the reader is stupid. He could easily have been introducing the next speaker, Bill Keller of the NY Times, who clearly thinks almost everyone who doesn't work at the NY Times is stupid.
What do you know, turns out that Bill Moyers is not funded by the government nor does he get tax money, like many Republicans like people to believe. The correction is here.
"Non-Alcoholic Sparkling Beverage" - Whole Foods' $7.99 name for "bottle of soda".
Problem with most religious people is that their faith tells them to play excellently in game of life, but they want to be the referees.
Hylke Bons on software engineering:
"on average, there's one bug for every 100 lines of code" this is why i put everything on one line
If government doesn't create jobs, isn't Romney admitting that his campaign is pointless?
OH "It is a very solid grey area" #sc34 #ooxml
"I don't care how many thousand words your blog post is, the words 'SYMBIAN WAS WINNING' mean you're too high on meth to listen too.
Jeremy Scahill on war monger Max Boots asks the questions
Do they make a Kevlar pencil protector? Asking for a think tanker.Max Boot earned a Purple Heart (shaped ink stain on his shirt) during the Weekly Standard War in 1994.
"W3C teams with Apple, Google, Mozilla on WebPlatform"... or we could all just sponsor a tag on StackOverflow.
Most programmers who claim that types "get in the way" had a sucky experience with Java 12 years ago, tried Python, then threw the baby out.
How Hollywood Studios employ creative accounting to avoid sharing the profits with the participants. If you were looking at ways to scam your employees and partners, look no further.
Startvation in Gaza: State forced to release 'red lines' document for food consumption.
Dirty tricks and disturbing trends: Billionaire warn employees that if Obama is reelected, they will be facing layoffs.
Israeli Children Deported to South Sudan Succumb to Malaria:
Here we are today, three months later, and within the last month alone, these two parents lost two children, and the two remaining ones are sick as well. Sunday is already in hospital with malaria, in serious condition, and Mahm is sick at home. “I’ve only two children left,” Michael told me today over the phone. The family doesn’t have money to properly treat their remaining children. The hospitals are at full capacity and more people leave them in shrouds than on their own two feet. I ask you, beg of you to help me scream the story of these children and their fate, dictated by the heartless, immoral Israeli government.
When Suicide is Cheaper the horrifying tales of Americans that can not afford health care.
Paul Ryan is not that different from Todd Akin, when it comes to women rights.
A Windows 8 critique: someone is not very happy with it.
On "meritocracy": what is wrong with it.
Fascinating read on the fast moving space of companies: Intimate Portrait of Innovation, Risk and Failure Through Hipstamatic's Lens.
Kathy Sierra discusses sexism in the tech world. How she changed her mind about it, and the story that prevented her from seeing it.
Response @antirez's sexist piece.
Chrystia Freeland's The Self Destruction of the 1% percent is a great article, which touches on the points of her book of Plutocrats
Sony's Steep Learning Process a look at the changing game with a focus on Sony's challenges.
One Minute Animated Primers on Major Theories on Religion.
Cat fact and Gif provides Cat facts with a gif that goes with it. The ultimate resource of cat facts and gifs.
Posted on 21 Oct 2012
The gnome-config script was a precursor to pkg-config, they are tools used that you can run and use to extract information about the flags needed to compile some code, link some code, or check for a version. gnome-config itself was a pluggable version of Tcl's tclConfig.sh script.
The idea is simple: pkg-config is a tiny little tool that uses a system database of packages to provide version checking and build information to developers. Said database is merely a well-known directory in the system containing files with the extension ".pc", one per file.
These scripts are designed to be used in shell scripts to probe if a particular software package has been installed, for example, the following shell script probes whether Mono is installed in the system:
# shell script
if pkg-config --exists mono; then
echo "Found Mono!"
else
echo "You can download mono from www.go.mono.com"
fi
It can also be used in simple makefiles to avoid hardcoding the paths to your software. The following makefile shows how:
CFLAGS = `pkg-config --cflags mono` LIBS = `pkg-config --libs mono` myhost: myhost.c
And if you are using Automake and Autoconf to probe for the existence of a module with a specific version and extract the flags needed to build a module, you would do it like this:
AC_SUBST(MONO_FLAGS)
AC_SUBST(MONO_LIBS)
if pkg-config --atleast-version=2.10 mono; then
MONO_FLAGS=`pkg-config --cflags mono`
MONO_LIBS=`pkg-config --libs mono`
else
AC_MSG_ERROR("You need at least Mono 2.10")
fi
There are two main use cases for pkg-config.
Probing: You use the tool to pobe for some condition about a package and taking an action based on this. For this, you use the pkg-config exit code in your scripts to determine whether the condition was met. This is what both the sample automake and the first script show.
Compile Information: You invoke the tool which outputs to standard output the results. To store the result or pass the values, you use the shell backtick (`). That is all there is to it (example: version=`pkg-config --version`).
The tool is so immensely simple that anyone can learn every command that matters in less than 5 minutes. The whole thing is beautiful because of its simplicity.
Perhaps it was a cultural phenomenon, perhaps someone that had nothing better to do, perhaps someone that was just trying to be thorough introduced one of the most poisoning memes into the pool of ideas around pkg-config.
Whoever did this, thought that the "if" statement in shell was a complex command to master or that someone might not be able to find the backtick on their keyboards.
And they hit us, and they hit us hard.
They introduced pkg.m4, a macro intended to be used with autoconf, that would allow you to replace the handful of command line flags to pkg-config with one of their macros (PKG_CHECK_MODULES, PKG_CHECK_EXISTS). To do this, they wrote a 200 line script, which replaces one line of shell code with almost a hundred. Here is a handy comparison of what these offer:
# Shell style AC_SUBST(MONO_LIBS) AC_SUBST(MONO_CFLAGS) if pkg-config --atleast-version=2.10 mono; then MONO_CFLAGS=`pkg-config --cflags mono` MONO_LIBS=`pkg-config --libs mono` else AC_MSG_ERROR(Get your mono from www.go-mono.com) fi # # With the idiotic macros # PKG_CHECK_MODULES([MONO], [mono >= 2.10],[], [ AC_MSG_ERROR(Get your mono from www.go-mono.com) ]) # # If you do not need split flags, shell becomes shorter # if pkg-config --atleast-version=2.10 mono; then CFLAGS="$CFLAGS `pkg-config --cflags mono`" LIBS="$LIBS `pkg-config --libs mono`" else AC_MSG_ERROR(Get your mono from www.go-mono.com) fi
The above shows the full benefit of using a macro, MONO is a prefix that will have LIBS and CFLAGS extracted. So the shell script looses. The reality is that the macros only give you access to a subset of the functionality of pkg-config (no support for splitting -L and -l arguments, querying provider-specific variable names or performing macro expansion).
Most projects, adopted the macros because they copy/pasted the recipe from somewhere else, and thought this was the right way of doing things.
The hidden price is that saving that few lines of code actually inflicts a world of pain on your users. You will probably see this in your forums in the form of:
Subject: Compilation error I am trying to build your software, but when I run autogen.sh, I get the following error: checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config ./configure: line 1758: syntax error near unexpected token FOO,' ./configure: line 1758:PKG_CHECK_MODULES(FOO, foo >= 2.9)'
And then you will engage in a discussion that in the best case scenario helps the user correctly configure his ACLOCAL_FLAGS, create his own "setup" script that will properly configure his system, and your new users will learn the difference between running a shell script and "sourcing" a shell script to properly setup his development system.
In the worst case scenario, the discussion will devolve into how stupid your user is for not knowing how to use a computer and how he should be shot in the head and taken out to the desert for his corpse to be eaten by vultures; because, god dammit, they should have googled that on their own, and they should have never in the first place have installed two separate automake installations in two prefixes, without properly updating their ACLOCAL_FLAGS or figured out on their own that their paths were wrong in the first place. Seriously, what moron in this day and age is not familiar with the limitations of aclocal and the best practices to use system-wide m4 macros?
Hours are spent on these discussions every year. Potential contributors to your project are driven away, countless hours that could have gone into fixing bugs and producing code are wasted, you users are frustrated. And you saved 4 lines of code.
The pkg.m4 is a poison that is holding us back.
We need to end this reign of terror.
Send pull requests to eliminate that turd, and ridicule anyone that suggests that there are good reasons to use it. In the war for good taste, it is ok to vilify and scourge anyone that defends pkg.m4.
Posted on 20 Oct 2012
Mitt Romney does not need to have an economic plan. He does not need to have a plan to cut the deficit or to cut services.
It is now well understood that to get the US out of the recession, the government has to inject money into the economy. To inject money into the economy, the US needs to borrow some money and spend it. Borrowing is also at an all-time low, so the price to pay is very low.
Economists know this, and Republicans know this.
But the Republicans top priority is to get Obama out of office at any cost. Even at the cost of prolonging the recession, damaging the US credit rating and keeping people unemployed.
The brilliance of the Republican strategy is that they have convinced the world that the real problem facing the US is the debt. Four years of non-stop propaganda on newspapers and TV shows have turned everyone into a "fiscal conservative". The propaganda efforts have succeeded into convincing the world that US economic policy should be subject to the same laws of balancing a household budget (I wont link to this idiocy).
The campaign has been a brilliant and has forced the Democrats to adopt policies of austerity, instead of policies of growth. Instead of spending left and right to create value, we are cutting. And yet, nobody has stopped the propaganda and pointed out that growth often comes after spending money. Startups start in the red and are funded for several years before they become profitable; Companies go public and use the IPO to raise capital to grow, and for many years they lose money until their investments pay off and allows them to turn the tide.
So this mood has forced Obama to talk about cuts. He needs to be detailed about his cuts, he needs to be a fiscal conservative.
But Economists and Republicans know what the real fix is. They know they have to spend money.
If Romney is elected to office, he will do just that. He will borrow and spend money, because that is the only way of getting out of the recession. That is why his plan does not need to have any substance, and why he can ignore the calls to get more details, because he has no intention to follow up with them.
Obama made a critical mistake in his presidency. He decided to compromise with Republicans, he was begging to be loved by Republicans and in the process betrayed his own base and played right into the Republican's plans.
Posted on 04 Oct 2012
A couple of weeks ago we released Mono 2.11.4; I had not had time to blog about it.
Since our previous release a month before, we had some 240 commits, spread like this:
488 files changed, 28716 insertions(+), 6921 deletions(-)
Among the major updates in this release:
And of course, a metric ton of bug fixes all around.
Head over to Mono's Download Page to get the goods. We would love to hear about any bugs to have a great stable release.
Posted on 02 Oct 2012
Today Microsoft announced TypeScript a typed superset of Javascript. This means that existing Javascript code can be gradually modified to add typing information to improve the development experience: both by providing better errors at compile time and by providing code-completion during development.
As a language fan, I like the effort, just like I pretty much like most new language efforts aimed at improving developer productivity: from C#, to Rust, to Go, to Dart and to CoffeeScript.
A video introduction from Anders was posted on Microsoft's web site.
Type information is erased when it is compiled. Just like Java erases generic information when it compiles, which means that the underling Javascript engine is unable to optimize the resulting code based on the strong type information.
Dart on the other hand is more ambitious as it uses the type information to optimize the quality of the generated code. This means that a function that adds two numbers (function add (a,b) { return a+b;}) can generate native code to add two numbers, basically, it can generate the following C code:
double add (double a, double b)
{
return a+b;
}
While weakly typed Javascript must generated something like:
JSObject add (JSObject a, JSObject b)
{
if (type (a) == typeof (double) &&
type (b) == typeof (double))
return a.ToDouble () + b.ToDouble ();
else
JIT_Compile_add_with_new_types ();
}
The majority of the Web is powered by Unix.
Developers use MacOS and Linux workstations to write the bulk of the code, and deploy to Linux servers.
But TypeScript only delivers half of the value in using a strongly typed language to Unix developers: strong typing. Intellisense, code completion and refactoring are tools that are only available to Visual Studio Professional users on Windows.
There is no Eclipse, MonoDevelop or Emacs support for any of the language features.
So Microsoft will need to convince Unix developers to use this language merely based on the benefits of strong typing, a much harder task than luring them with both language features and tooling.
There is some basic support for editing TypeScript from Emacs, which is useful to try the language, but without Intellisense, it is obnoxious to use.
Posted on 01 Oct 2012