Development > C/C++Essentials

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, and Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash. We have also spoken to Charles H. Moore about Forth. In this interview, we chat to Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame about the design and development of C++, garbage collection and the role of facial hair in successful programming languages.

In this interview Microsoft's leader of C# development, Anders Hejlsberg, took some time to tell Computerworld about the development of C#, his thoughts on future programming trends, and his experiences putting out fires. Hejlsberg is also responsible for writing the Turbo Pascal system, and was the lead architect on the team that developed Delphi.

In separate moves, Microsoft has released its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack but discontinued extended support for the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE.

Embarcadero Technologies this week plans to unveil next-generation CodeGear rapid application development (RAD) tools for Windows, featuring support for Microsoft's Silverlight technology for media and rich Internet applications.

Intel on Tuesday will unveil at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in the US, what it described as a substantial upgrade to Intel Threading Building Blocks. TBB 2.1, a developer tool that features a C++ template library for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, enables developers to add parallelism to C++.

Nokia has offered to buy Trolltech, the Norwegian developer of a widely used application framework, for 844 million Norwegian kroner ($US153 million) in cash. Nokia hopes the Trolltech development team will give its own software efforts a boost.

You're now with Qumranet which is the company behind KVM. Can you briefly tell me about the design of KVM and how that differs from previous virtualization approaches such as Xen and VMware?

Sydney-based IVR and VoiceXML application vendor Holly Connects is taking on the world with software developed with a mix of agile and traditional methods, without the offshoring.