Clang Successfully Self-Hosts!:

Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM’s regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap.

Congratulations to all of the Clang developers on this amazing achievement!

Huzzah! I’m so buying LLVM/Clang devs a drink if I ever meet them.

While quite a lot has been said about the iPad, I feel this succinct list from my friend Daniel Pasco sums it up:

iPad: from the company and the man that brought you: The Apple ][ Macintosh iMac OS X iPod iPhone

/via Soft Arts/Daniel Pasco

Apple has just released one of the coolest new technologies in OS X 10.6 as open source: libdispatch.

With libdispatch and blocks out in the wild I hope to see some of this tech coming my way for the day job. Woo hoo!

Bill Bumgarner is an engineer at Apple, Inc. He’s graciously provided a couple of primer documents for blocks, Apple’s new addition to the C-based languages (C, Objective-C, and C++). If you’re interested in blocks these are a great overview:

• Blocks Basics
• Blocks Tips & Tricks

Enjoy.

A good overview of Grand Central Dispatch and Blocks.

/dev/why!?!: Grand Central Dispatch

The simplistic explanation is that GCD is a combination of thread pooling and closures. The honest truth is that if thread pooling is a Motorola ROKR then GCD is an iPhone 3GS… while they are both phones and nominally do the same thing, no one would ever claim they are equal, or even i the same league. The guys at Apple who came up with it deserve a ton of credit.

Square Signals : KVO+Blocks: Block Callbacks for Cocoa Observers: “Andy
Matuschak.

Panther introduced Key-Value Observing, a Cocoa implementation of the observer pattern. It’s very useful, but the API kind of sucks.

To get observation notices, you have to override a lengthy selector (observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context:), provide a static context pointer, and essentially implement a big switch statement on the key path.

That’s unwieldy, but I think it also makes for unmaintainable code: the callbacks end up thrown in the same method, and they’re separated from the observer registration.

KVO+Blocks is an NSObject category I wrote which provides addObserverForKeyPath:task:, where the latter parameter is a block.

Programming with C Blocks on Apple Devices by Joachim Bengtsson

In Mac OS X 10.6, Apple introduced a syntax and runtime for using blocks (more commonly known as closures) in C and Objective-C. These were both later back-ported to Mac OS X 10.5 and the iPhone by Plausible Labs. However, there is very little documentation on blocks; even Apple’s documentation that come with 10.6 is very vague on what memory management rules apply. I hope that you can avoid all the trial-and-error that I went through with the help of this guide.

iPhone Sudoku Grab: How does it all work? A very cool, detailed but not over your head, overview of how the iPhone app Sudoku Grab can use a picture of a Sudoku board to generate a playable game.

From Andrew Pouliot comes a great tip about using the Core Animation debug mode both on a touch device or in the simulator. This really helps get to the core of blending and where your app can stand to speed up.

(via stevenf.)