EDDIC 0.7 : New compilation model and optimizations

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I’m proud to announce a new release of EDDIC, the version 0.7.
Most of the changes are internal to the compiler. I read a new book : Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools and applied some of the advices of the author. The biggest change is the use of a new intermediate representation : Three-Address-Code statements. This representation is easy, all the statements are basically of the …

Install Cinnamon in Linux Mint – A forked Gnome Shell

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In the last Linux Mint version (12), the developers have introduced a set of extensions to the Gnome Shell, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE).
But, plugins can’t do everything the developers want. So they forked Gnome Shell and started building their own shell : Cinnamon.
At the time of writing, the appearance of this new shell is similar to MGSE in Linux Mint 12, but with …

Merry Christmas

A bit late, but better late than never : Merry Christmas to all the readers of this blog

Moodle promotion on Packt Publishing Books

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In their December promotion, Pack Publishing are offering heavy discounts on all their Moodle books during all the month.
You can find all books available on offer on this page : http://www.packtpub.com/news/moodle-festive-month
There are great offers:

Buy any Moodle print book and get 20% off
Buy any Moodle eBook and get 30% off

For those who don’t know Moodle, Moodle is currently the world’s most popular E-learning platform. Moodle is a free, open-source PHP web application for …

WordPress 3.3 “Sonny” released!

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WordPress 3.3 introduces some very interesting features, specially for the blogger itself. It includes a new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, a new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and a new Tumblr importer.
The admin interface has add a great cleanup too.
More information on the official release notes : http://wordpress.org/news/2011/12/sonny/
I already updated the blog to WordPress 3.3 and it looks great for now. For the first …

C++ Templates : The Complete Guide – Book Review

C++ Template Book

After the Effective C++ Serie, I read C++ Templates: The Complete Guide, from David Vandevoorde and Nicolai M. Josuttis
The templates are one of the most powerful feature of C++. However, this is a complex technique that is often misused or misunderstood. This book will help you learning what exactly are templates and how they can be used to improve your software development in C++.
This …

Dynamic memory allocation in Intel Assembly on Linux

For the version 0.6.0 of the EDDI Compiler, I have written a simple dynamic memory allocation function in assembly. I did that to avoid using malloc in my assembly code. As this is not an easy subject, this article will explain the main parts of writing this function.
As the EDDI Compiler creates program for Linux platform, this article will focus on writing a little …

EDDI Compiler 0.6.1 : Function return types

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I just released a new version of the EDDI Compiler : eddic 0.6.1
This is a minor update with only one change on the language: the functions can now return something. The return values are returned in registers (%eax for int and %eax:%ebx for strings). At this time, it is not possible to return an array from a function.
The other changes of this version are …

Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) released!

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Linux Mint 12 has just been released!
This new version includes a Gnome 3 using a specific extension MGSE (Mint Gnome Sheel Extensions) and a Gnome 2 UI (MATE). You will find also a lot of other improvements.
From several months, Linux Mint is the most used Linux distribution.
For more informations, you can read the official announcement

How to print strings and integers in Intel Assembly on Linux ?

In this post, we’ll learn how to print strings and integers to the console on Linux using Intel Assembly. In this post, I’ll use the AT&T notation, because it’s the notation used in EDDI.
In EDDI, I have to print strings and numbers to the console, as this is not an easy exercise, I wanted to share my experience here.
On Linux, the only …