On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code.

"The GCC development team have announced the availability of a first release candidate for version 4.4 of their GNU Compiler Collection..."

Groovy++, the static typing compiler extension for Groovy, is to be released as open source under the APL2. The Groovy++ project started last year and at the time Alex Tkachman, project founder said Groovy++'s compiler "uses several pieces of technology, which our company uses and plans to use in our commercial products.

As corporate and government organizations embrace the Web for delivering more education and training programs, a wealth of free and open source e-learning applications will help lower the barrier to entry. TechWorld looks at the options.

Last week GCC 4.5.0 entered the world with improvements. Over the weekend we decided to benchmark this major update to the GNU Compiler Collection to see how its performance compares to that of GCC 4.3 and 4.4.

Intel's Eric Anholt has been working on writing a GLSL2 compiler for their open-source Mesa graphics stack. Mesa's GL Shading Language compiler has been limited to version 1.4 support, but Eric is making headway in supporting version 2.0. In response to the recent ATI R300 GLSL discussion, Eric has provided an update on the Intel efforts.

The GNU project developed some of the 21st century's most important software. The GNU Compiler Collection is used on Linux systems, BSD/OSX systems, and on Windows. GNAT has, for the most part, replaced any other Ada compiler ever created. The list could go on, but you get the idea. The sad thing about GNU is that it is so ideologically bent that I can no longer support it.

Version 2.6 of LLVM, the Low-Level Virtual Machine, has been released.

"For the last two months I have been working with Mozilla on a just-in-time compiler for the JavaScript engine in Firefox, and a few hours ago this project (codenamed TraceMonkey) has landed in the main Firefox development tree. TraceMonkey is a trace-based JIT compiler and it pushes the envelope on JavaScript performance..."