[Tnfox-announce] v0.5 of TnFOX released

[Niall D. <s_s...@ne...>]

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This is in fact the penultimate release of TnFOX alphas as v0.6 will 
contain the last lot of major new code and my apologies for the 
remainder of this release actually appearing on the 27th - some 
friends turned up mid-upload. This release has been very much centred 
around filling in the gaps so to speak and because the new features 
build on old ones, a particularly large number of bugs have been 
fixed (including all memory leaks known). I also took the opportunity 
to improve on hashing, memory use and removed some hard limits in 
previous versions.

The generic tools library now has generic functors and bound functors 
which are used throughout TnFOX now - all callback style code is 
gone. You can also instantiate a typelist into a container which is 
very powerful plus we now have a policy driven Alexandrescu-style 
smart pointer. This unfortunately causes yet more problems with GCC 
but I've submitted the bug reports.

There are more extensions to the QTL, including QPtrVector, 
QStringList and QFileInfoList plus a generic policy driven list sort 
algorithm which easily outperforms ANSI qsort() never mind being far 
more flexible. Qt compatibility is further enhanced with API 
compatible FXFileInfo and FXDir.

Improved host OS facilities include FXThreadPool (with timed 
dispatches as well as instant) and FXFSMonitor, the latter allowing 
infinite monitoring of filesystem paths for changes. Security gets 
another boost with FXACL & FXACLEntity which provide Access Control 
List based security for Windows NT and SE-Linux with a reasonable 
emulation for POSIX - all FXIODevice's now permit reading of device 
permissions and most permit setting. There is no longer any technical 
reason why TnFOX based code can't run as a NT service.

Python support is now more or less finished with FXPythonInterp 
completely rewritten. You can now embed python into your C++ 
/extremely/ easily in the form of mini-scripts or even just 
manipulate python variables directly from C++. You can also run 
multiple interpreters and multiple threads within those interpreters 
with remarkable ease - it's all abstracted away and taken care of for 
you. Lastly, the old problem of FOX GUI sort functions now has a very 
useable workaround based on some particularly heinous template code 
:)

Unfortunately the namespace scoping bug of GCC v3.2 is also present 
in v3.3.2 and there's also a problem with GCC ignoring templated 
friends with that release. v3.4 CVS is just not ready yet with issues 
concerning building the stdc++ as well as linking against it. Hence 
once again no binaries will be provided for Linux as you get a 
segmentation fault on process exit.

Next version will see the IPC messaging classes imported from Tornado 
- - however I'll be reworking them to use thread pools and a finite 
state machine so the performance problems when you created a data 
stream in Tornado (it took half a second) caused by deeply recursing 
message handlers goes away. I also need to tackle FXCursor with a 
full colour & animated replacement so Tornado's funky hourglass code 
can be ported. And after that, it will be betas only! Happy 
Christmas!

Cheers,
Niall





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