Here are some interesting software releases in the past few month:
- Java 1.6
- For me, it looks more like an incremental update than anything else, and could have been named 1.5.5 or something, but still an important release. I know, most of the important changes are "under the skin", but still I can't help but think that the only interesting new ting for a developer is the scripting API. Apple has a "developer preview" release, but the PowerPC version has the JIT compiler deactivated, i.e. it will run really slow on my laptop.
- Groovy 1.0
- Speaking of scripting in Java, Groovy finally released version 1.0. For now, this is my favorite scripting language for Java.
- D Programming Language, version 1.0
- The only programming language good enough to be called the proper successor of C. Even now I still consider C++ a hack, and both Objective-C and C# too dependent on a large run-time engine to be a proper "compiled language" that could replace C. I'll have to make another entry just on D, but for now I can say that in about 2 years it could replace C as my compiled/fast language of choice, while keeping Java and Perl for the rest.
- ZFS on FUSE/Linux, version 0.4-alpha
- First usable version of ZFS for Linux. It still has some limitations, for example you can run an executable off a ZFS partition, but there is only a few months left before a 1.0-beta. If you know the advantages of ZFS over almost all other file systems on the market today, this can be huge.
OK, enough for now. I was planning to write a review of Ghost in the Shell, Standalone Complex (which I found in a store after all), but I'm too tired.
Published on January 6, 2007 at 14:46 EST
Older post: Decisions...
Newer post: Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex