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.

New Libraries coming ...

Commercial and publishing reasons are forcing me to do what I should have done a *long* time ago, and release several pending libraries in the coming days:
* xContract - a contract programming enforcement library; initially for C/C++
* xCover - a code coverage library for C and C++
* FastFormat - already available as an alpha, this will hit the non-alpha/non-beta status in the coming days; as the name implies, it's faster than all the competition put together ;-)
* Pantheios - in beta (and very popular) for two years, the world's fastest and most robust logging API library has waited long enough for a final 1.0 release.

Also, STLSoft is going to be moving to SourceForge in the next week or so, and it too will receive a face lift and an update to docs, tests, and so on.

If anyone wants to volunteer any help for any of these activities, you'd be extraordinarily welcome.

Cheers

Matt

xContract released

xContract is a contract enforcement library for C and C++, written in C. Its notable features are:

• Phase Separation. It supports the separation of the three phases of contract enforcement: detection, reporting and response. Detection is achieved by simple boolean condition evaluation. Reporting is achieved via a callback function, either the stock xContract_violationReport() function, or one supplied by the user. Response is to terminate the process.
• The Principle of Irrecoverability. If the reporting receiver does not cause the process to terminate, then the library will always do so.
• The Principle of Removability. Enforcements may be enabled/disabled either at compile-time or at runtime according to the choices of the programmer
• Portability. It relies on no platform-specific or compiler-specific constructs. The only library it relies on is the 100% header-only, open-source STLSoft library. It works with a large number of C/C++ compilers.

xContract is the second of a triumvirate of C/C++ software quality assurance libraries provided by Synesis Software. The first library, xTests, is an automated testing library. The third, as yet unreleased, library, xCover, is an automated code coverage library.