Pantheios 1.0 countdown ... what do you want to see?

I'm on the home straight with the Pantheios 1.0 final (non-beta) release. I've started a discussion thread on the Pantheios Open Discussion forum to garner opinion from current (and future!) users as to what features should make it into 1.0 (and what will have to wait until future versions).

I'm very happy to hear contributions, so please give me your opinions.

Thanks

Release early, release often; FastFormat 0.2.1 (alpha 4)

The value of the open-source adage to "release early, release often" has shown itself once again, this time with respect to the FastFormat library. There are a large number of things to go into this library on its progress from 0.2 onwards, but it's been stuck for a month waiting for me to get my act together. Part of the delay is due to the fact that I let too many changes creep in, which complicates the testing and the formulation of the distribution (incl. just listing the changes).

So, I've just released 0.2.1 (alpha 4), which is a sound base for the future releases. It incorporates various minor fixes and adjustments, and a wholesale refactoring of the contract enforcement API. (An analogous refactoring has also been done for Pantheios, and is available in its latest release.)

STLSoft 1.10 coming: Contracts, Coverage, TR1, new components

It's been two years in the making, but the STLSoft 1.10 branch is finally about to begin showing its face to the world. There are a number of important new features to be introduced to the libraries, and we've reached the point where the 1.9 branch won't take more new features being stuffed into it.

Initially, the new branch will be presented as a series of "alpha delta" releases, each of which will rely on the 1.9 branch being visible in the include path (after 1.10, of course, to allow source interpositioning). That's largely because the task of bringing over all the 1.9 components at once is just too daunting.

So what's going to be new in 1.10? Well, that's a hard question to answer, largely because 1.10 is not likely to come out of alpha until 2009. However, there are some aspects that are already certain to go in:

• Improved contract enforcement support, separating out the different aspects of Contract Programming. Users will have the option to use xContract, the current assert()-based enforcement approach, or any other contract enforcement library they choose. (That xContract is itself implemented in terms of STLSoft confers a little complexity, but this will be handled by the separate compilation of the two libaries: in the compilation of xTests, STLSoft's contracts will be the old assert()-based ones.)
  
• Code coverage. This is in its infancy because the library it will use, xCover, is as yet unreleased
  
• Properties File library. This will provide full support for the Java Properties file format, with the usual high-performance tweaks (incl. memory mapping and string views)
• Reworking of all the per-compiler feature discrimination. Some early hints of how this will work are to be found in msvc.h and gcc.h
• TR1 components, to facilitate migration to these new components
  
• and lots more ... including user-requested functionality, so please get your requests in now.

If anyone wants to offer help in this marathon effort, you'll be spectacularly welcome.

Busy times; Pantheios.COM release

Things are really busy at the moment, what with my current commercial client and doing a fair chunk of the writing commitments that I've been dodging for much of this year.

I'm committed to writing 8 articles over the next year, about things to do with Monolith (FastFormat, Pantheios, Type-tunneling, Shims, and so on).

But in the meantime things are progressing on the libraries. Today I've released a new version of Pantheios.COM, which fixes incompatibility with early-binding automation clients (such as Visual Basic and Delphi).