Friday, August 9, 2002 Announcement ============ The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are pleased to announce the beta release of Babel, version 0.7.2. ************************* NOTICE ************************* Changes related to support for Python 2.2 have resulted in the requirement that distutils be installed to use the Python bindings. Python 1.6 and higher have distutils built in; however, we have only used Python 2.0 and higher. ************************* NOTICE ************************* What's New ========== The following features have been added, or completed, in this minor release: + Added --exclude= command line option to exclude code generation for all symbols matching the regular expression (see bugs #369 and #425 for more) + Made C++ array set method argument ordering consistent with C, F77, etc. + Completed support for overloaded functions based on an exact match of the arguments + Added Python Distutils to support Python 2.2 + Removed support for Python builds using Makefile.pre.in approach + Closed 20 bug reports (see below for list) (Also refer to the CHANGES file for more details.) Bug Reports Closed ================== There were 20 bug reports closed during this release period, 12 of which were fixed, 4 were deemed unrepeatable, and it was determined that 4 would not be fixed. Details can be found at in the Bug Tracking system (http://www-casc.llnl.gov/bugs/). Those that were fixed are listed below. 268 Typedef for user data structure in back end 290 Static/dynamic loading documented 311 Documentation of code example with version 354 Optionally suppress "source-line = " comments 369 Babel generates code for everything you reference 376 Possible bug in header paths for Python 417 Inconsistent use of cast in epv 421 Arrays of objects always do reference counting ops 425 "including" existing packages 443 Babel 101 command line options error 444 Improper reuse of PWD macro reserved word 445 Improper reuse of PWD macro reserved word (Duplicate) What Babel Is ============= Babel is designed to address problems of language interoperability, particularly in scientific/engineering applications. At the simplest level, Babel generates glue code so that libraries written in one programming language are callable from other programming languages. Babel generates this glue code from an interface description written in SIDL, our Scientific Interface Definition Language. Babel supports full Object-Oriented features and exception handling even in non-OO languages such as C or Fortran77. Supported Languages =================== Babel currently supports calling libraries written in C, C++, F77, or Python from drivers written in either C, C++, F77, Python or Java. (Python support also requires the Numerical Python set of extensions at http://numpy.sourceforge.net) Supported Platforms =================== Linux Solaris Cygwin (More expected in next few months.) Caveat ====== Babel is research in progress. This is a beta release looking for more friendly users and now some power users. Babel has been used on a few real projects now, there are still too few examples, but the documentation is improving. Availability ============ The software is available for free download at http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/components User Resources ============== Two email lists have been set up for the Babel community: babel-users@llnl.gov (unmoderated discussions) babel-announce@llnl.gov (announcements only) To subscribe to one or both of these email lists, send email to with the text "subscribe babel-announce", "subscribe babel-users", or both (one per line). Contacting the Authors ====================== If you have any questions or concerns with the installation process or usage of Babel, feel free to contact the project team at components@llnl.gov. To report bugs or suggest feature enhancements, please submit a report in the bug database at http://www-casc.llnl.gov/bugs/. $Id: ANNOUNCE-0.7.2.txt 676 2002-08-16 19:04:37Z dahlgren $