gamma@unizh.UUCP (gamma) (03/15/89)
There were some questions on the net about ET++: * Does anyone have it yet? Currently the university of Linz in Austria and a group of the ETH are using prereleases of ET++ in larger projects outside of our university since 6 months. We will start shipping the first "official" public domain version of ET++ during the next two weeks. * Is anyone on the information mailing list? We have currently about 200 addresses. We were somewhat lazy concerning acknowledgements because we were flooded with requests, sorry. There were some delays with the completion of the first public domain release of ET++, because we had some time consuming teaching responsibilities and we underestimated the effort required to build a distribution of our software. In the meantime we produced two more papers about ET++: - Andre Weinand, Erich Gamma, Rudolf Marty, Design and Implementation of ET++, a Seamless Object-Oriented Application Framework, Structured Programming, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1989 Springer Verlag. This issue will appear in June but a copy of this paper will be included in the distribution. - Erich Gamma, Andre Weinand, Rudolf Marty, Integration of a Programming Environment into ET++ - A Case Study To be presented at ECOOP 89 in Nottingham Prior to the distribution we would like to give some more information about the hardware and software dependencies of ET++. - Compiler ET++ was developed with AT&T's <<cfront 1.2.1 2/16/87>> on SUN workstations. Three bug fixes have to be applied to this version in order to compile ET++. These bug fixes require that you have the source code of cfront 1.2.1 at your disposal! The only other implementation of C++ we have tried was a beta release of Oregon C++ without success. In addtion to the bug fixes we have made a small modification to cfront 1.2.1 in order to reduce the space required for vtbl's. - Hardware ET++ runs currently on SUN-2 und SUN-3 architectures. Running ET++ on a SUN-4 has never been tried out. There will be a problem on the SPARC architecture with a few lines of code that access the stack directly, without using <stdarg.h>. ET++ runs on color screens but the current version provides no support for using colors. - OS ET++ runs under the SunOS releases 3.4, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.0.1. Under 4.0 the are some problems due to a bug that is fixed in 4.0.1. The symptom of this bug is that an ET++ application can only be executed once. Attempts to start an application a second time fail with a strange "core dump". - Window Systems SunView, X11.3(BETA), and NeWS 1.1 (this version is only experimental) The collection classes of ET++ are independent of any window system and can be used separately. Contents of the distribution ---------------------------- - description of the bug fixes in cfront 1.2.1 - source code of ET++ class library - interface for SunView, X11.3(beta) and NeWS 1.1 (experimental!) - interface for POSTSCRIPT and PIC output generation - interface to SUNOS - example applications developed with ET++ - fonts for SunView and X11 - public domain utilities: font converters and a makefile dependency generator - A copy of the ET++ papers listed above - Binaries of some ET++ applications for those not having a C++ compiler available to get an idea of the functionality of ET++ applications (the binaries are for a SUN 3 running SUNOS 4.0.1). ET++ is now available for a nominal charge of 100 $. In order to obtain a copy on a cartidge of ET++ send a check drawn on a Swiss bank, international money orders, or eurochecks. Checks should be made payable to Institut fuer Informatik University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 190 CH-8057 Zuerich, Switzerland We are still looking for other distribution channels of ET++ because we do not have the infrastructure to support a large scale distribution. Any suggestions are welcome. *** Please copy yourself ***. Another point where we would like to get some feedback is whether it is legal or helpful for those having a source code licence for AT&T's cfront 1.2.1 to provide a version of the distribution including our C++ compiler. This would eliminate the porting effort of cfront 1.2.1 to SUNs and eliminate conflicts due to different versions of C++ compilers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Andre Weinand, Erich Gamma, Institut fuer Informatik, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 190 CH-8057 Zuerich, Switzerland UUCP(USA): ...seismo!mcvax!cernvax!unizh!gamma EAN: gamma@ifi.unizh.ch Tel.: +41-1-257-4333 Telex: 817 251 UNII CH Fax: +41-1-257-4004