The Illusion of Progress

Take my hand and let us dive into the wonderful world of my current projects. Take a brief glimpse on the wonders at your feet.

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Farewell, Dennis Ritchie

He was father of the C programming language and without him there would be no UNIX. His pioneering work paved the way for many modern programming / scripting languages like Objective-C, C#, Perl, Java, Go, JavaScript and PHP. Entire operating systems are written in C or build upon the UNIX legacy, most notably BSD and hence Mac OS X. Farewell, Dennis Ritchie… may you rest in peace.

Great things to come

Right now I’m busy developing a new Parcel Calculator release (which actually incorporates tons of cool features) but I am also gathering information for some new tutorials. One will explain how to write a command line utility in portable C and the usage of Mac OS X as cross-compilation platform, I mentioned this in an earlier post. There are some great things on the way, can you feel it in the air?

pcp (Parcel Calculator Portable)

I was gathering information for a “Portability and Cross-Compilation under Mac OS X” tutorial when I came to the conclusion to create a portable version of my Objective-C / Cocoa project Parcel Calculator. Nothing bloated, just a command line utility providing Parcel Calculator’s most common features to users of other platforms than Mac OS X. I decided to use C syntax for this purpose. C is still one of the most popular programming languages and there are very few computer architectures without a C compiler. A standards-compliant and portably written C program can be compiled for a very wide variety of platforms and operating systems with little or no change to it’s source code. So the idea behind was to implement as much portable C programming knowledge as possible to the project’s codebase while keeping it simple and understandable.

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switchtemp.c

Template for a switchable command line utility, written in portable C. Various flags already set, for example -v for version output. Special feature is a customizable switch counter that limits the amount of processed arguments. On this page you will always find the latest variant, code is maintained at GitHub.

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ptarget.h

Portable C header for embedding in your own projects. Aims to detect major operating systems and compilers. Detections works properly with cross-compilers. On this page you will always find the latest variant, code is maintained at GitHub.

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