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.

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.

"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.

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.

While announcing open-source-based virtualization and a Solaris server partnership with Dell on Wednesday, Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told Oracle's OpenWorld that Sun was "one of the first" in the industry to deliver a virtual machine - the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

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.

Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday — a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems.

As other countries embrace free, open source software (like Austrian schools learning how to use OpenOffice), especially GNU/Linux distributions on the desktop as alternatives to Windows/Mac, the burning question is, how long before the USA catches on? That said, consider how 10th and 11th grade Vietnamese and foreign students are learning...