After four years of work, the team behind the free and open source cross-platform widget toolkit GTK has finally emitted the fourth major release. Since starting in October 2016, the developers were able to rework data transfer to be closer to the Wayland API, improve accessibility infrastructure, make showing animations easier, and promote shaders to first-class objects.

CUDA 11.2 ups the ante on cuFFT performance

Nvidia has pushed version 11.2 of its parallel computing platform CUDA into the world. The update includes various enhancements to CUDA graph, such as new APIs and node types, better options to work with DirectX11/12, and additional Driver and Runtime API functions.

Tooling saw a number of improvements as well, which is why the nvcc compiler now includes options to emit information about inlining decisions, configure warnings, and use more optimisation hints. To get rid of the mangled names nvcc produces, the CUDA team has come up with cu++filt, which is now available for testing. Other than that cuFFT should see some improvements when working with R2C/C2C/C2R transform or multi-GPU systems.

CUDA improvements are also heavily featured in the just released PoCL 1.6. The portable computing language has reworked the associated backend leading to better performance for tasks involving local memory. It also brings back PowerPC 8/9 support and includes improvements to packaging support.

Eclipse presents last release train of the year

73 projects from the ecosystem surrounding the Eclipse IDE have chipped in to get the second quarterly release of 2020 out of the door. Amongst other things, the release train brings devs a major update to the embedded C/C++ development tools, new actions in the toolbar of the C/C++ build console, and improvements in SSH handling in EGit.

Most changes however can be found in the Java Editor. The latter has learned a couple of new quick assists and clean ups for tasks like converting switch statements to switch expressions, moving assignments, and combining nested if statements in else blocks. Details can be found in the various project notes.

Eclipse users working with the Spring framework can take the opportunity to also update their Spring Tools suite. Version 4.9 is now available for Eclipse, Theia, and Visual Studio Code aficionados and mainly scores by offering Java 15 support.

ISO sends C++20 on its merry way

The International Organization for Standardization ISO has just published the latest version of the C++ programming language standard, thus making C++ 20 with new language features like concepts and designated initialisers officially available. 

Works on this iteration of the standard were finalised in February 2020, with technical approval following in September. The next C++ version is expected to hit in 2023, and is hoped to include coroutine support, executors, and the results of the development team’s foray into modularisation.