Monday, 20 October 2008 Announcement ============ The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are pleased to announce Babel 1.4.0, the next major step in Babel research. What's New ========== The following features have been added, or completed, in this release: + Babel now includes CHASM-lite as part of the distribution, so you no longer should pre-install CHASM (since 1.0). + Major autotools upgrade + New --makefile option for basic GNU Makefile generation + Support for PathScale compilers + Lots of little fixes and portability improvements + Bundle libparsifal instead of using libxml2 (since 1.0) + Experimental struct support in C, C++, and Python + F2003 binding includes experimental struct support + Latest interface contract enforcement support (beta) (Also refer to the CHANGES file for more details.) 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. Babel also addresses platform interoperability through its support for Remote Method Invocation (RMI), an object-oriented form of remote procedure calls (RPC). Babel RMI gives programmers the ability to write distributed programs with minimal change to their existing source. Supported Languages =================== Babel currently supports calling libraries written in C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, Java, or Python from drivers written in either C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, Python or Java. (Python support also requires the Numerical Python set of extensions at http://numpy.sourceforge.net/ ). Supported Platforms =================== Linux IBM BG/L Jaguar Solaris AIX (except Python server) Mac OSX (not fully supported) Caveat ====== Babel is research in progress. This is a release candidate for a production release, but it is still supported by a research effort. Babel has been used on numerous projects now. Documentation for the newest features may not be complete. We suggest checking our WWW site for our recent presentations about new features. 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 https://www.cca-forum.org/bugs/babel/, or send email to babel-bugs@cca-forum.org. $Id: ANNOUNCE 6548 2008-10-10 17:14:08Z epperly $