PLANNED MAJOR CHANGES "SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE" (i.e., exact beta not known) =========================================================================== . (Remedy) VxWorks 6.2 support USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.8 and ACE-5.4.9 ==================================================== . Added dozens of new ACE_LACKS and ACE_HAS defines which are used to simplify the ACE_OS layer . Constructors of ACE_Time_Value have been made explicit to prevent implicit conversions. . Added a shutdown() method to ACE_Barrier. The new method aborts the wait by all threads. . Changed the behavior of ACE_Message_Queue::enqueue_head() and enqueue_tail(). If the enqueued message block has other blocks chained to it via its next() pointer, the entire chain of blocks will be enqueued at once. . Improved the support for high-resolution timers with ACE_Timer_Queue_Adapter. . Make it possible to disable file caching in JAWS. . Improved ACE_Pipe implementation so that it uses localhost to avoid firewall problems. . Added Unicode support to the Service Configurator. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.7 and ACE-5.4.8 ==================================================== . Improved IPv6 support . Improved 64bit portability . TTY_IO overhaul - Improved documentation. - It is now possible to request infinite timeout in portable manner. This can be achieved by setting negative value to readtimeoutmsec. - Various bugs fixed and portability issues resolved. . Subset ACE for TAO and TAO Services . Support for Intel C++ 9.0 on Windows and Linux . Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (aka VC8) for Win32 as well as the Windows CE platforms Pocket PC 2003 and Windows Mobile 5. Solution/project files are generated with an appended "_vc8" for Win32 and "_WinCE" for the CE platforms. See ACE_wrappers/docs/CE-status.txt for more information. . Completed implementation of ACE_Dev_Poll_Reactor using the Linux epoll facility; tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. . The in-memory size of an ACE_RB_Tree will be smaller due to rearranged placement of pointers. . Added an optimization to CDR stream to ignores alignment when marshaling data. Use this new ACE_LACKS_CDR_ALIGNMENT compile-time option only when the ACE_DISABLE_SWAP_ON_READ macro is enabled. This new option requires ACE CDR engine to do both marshaling and demarshaling, and when this option is enabled the encoded streams are no longer compliant with the CORBA CDR specification. . Developed Feature Oriented Customizer (FOCUS) tool to enable specialization of middleware frameworks such as Reactor and Protocol framework. FOCUS provides an XML based transformation engine, where the transformations to specialize the components are captured in XML file and a weaver specializes the code. . Added support for unrolling ACE_OS::memcpy copy loop where applicable to improve performance. Autoconf tests empirically determine whether loop unrolling is at least 10% better than default version. . Added support for an ACE "versioned" namespace. When enabled, ACE library sources will be placed within a namespace of the user's choice or a namespace of the form ACE_5_4_7 by default, where "5_4_7" is the ACE major, minor and beta versions. The default may be overridden by defining the ACE_VERSIONED_NAMESPACE_NAME preprocessor symbol. Enable overall versioned namespace support by adding "versioned_namespace=1" to your MPC default.features file. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.6 and ACE-5.4.7 ==================================================== . Support for shared libraries with VxWorks . Support for Solaris 10 on x86 with Sun Studio 10 (C++ 5.7). . Extended ACE_OS::event_xxx implementation to support platforms having either PThread support with Process Shared condition variables or POSIX semaphores with named (process shared) semaphore support or using the new FIFO based semaphores. . ACE_OS::closesocket() no longer calls ACE_OS::shutdown() on any platform while closing the socket. It previously called ACE_OS::shutdown() on HP-UX. Removing this call fixes the fork-and-close programming paradigm that's common to many networked applications. . RMCast - Support for message fragmentation. This will allow for messages larger than 64K. - Support for flow control. - Timed recv() in RMCast::Socket. - Per-instance configurable protocol parameters (e.g., message retention time, NAK timeout, etc). USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.5 and ACE-5.4.6 ==================================================== . Updated RMCast to include - Reactor-compatible interface. - Message unavailability reporting. - Protocol documentation. . Added support for 64bit Visual Age on AIX . Improved g++ 4.0 support. A number of RTTI related problems have been fixed. . Smaller footprint. . Fixed memory leaks ACE_DLL and ACE_Log_Msg classes. . The ACE::ICMP_Socket and ACE::Ping_Socket classes were moved out of the ACE namespace and "flattened" to ACE_ICMP_Socket and ACE_Ping_Socket to be consistent with the rest of ACE. . ACE_INET_Addr::set_address() - fixed a possible struct member alignment issue when building an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address. . Added a new ACE::wild_match() function to match a string based on wildcards. . Added efficient overloads for string concatenation to the ACE_String_Base class. . Added support for the use of pthread_getschedparam on MacOS X. . Fixed an issue with static initialization of TSS related classes on static builds for Windows. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.4 and ACE-5.4.5 ==================================================== . Remove special handling in the Thread Specific Storage(TSS) code that released the TSS key for ACE_TSS. ACE_TSS has been changed to explicitly free the TSS key when necessary. . On Win32 systems: detect thread termination via a hook in DLLMain for ACE.dll. This allows cleanup of TSS objects for non-ACE threads that use ACE functions. The most common case was threads that used ACE logging. Formerly any TSS objects created by these threads would be leaked. . Added support for GNU G++ 4.0. The x.4.5 beta takes advantage of g++ 4.0's symbol visibility. This feature is conceptually similar to MS Windows "__declspec(dllexport)" DLL functionality. Using this new g++ feature results in substantially improved ACE/TAO/CIAO shared library binaries. A subset of the improvements include the following: * The number of unnecessarily exported DSO/DLL symbols is greatly reduced, resulting in faster program start times. * Smaller footprint. * Improved performance since run-time indirection of internal symbols is no longer needed. No changes to the ACE/TAO sources were necessary to support this feature since the required visibility attributes were hidden behind the various "*_Export" macros (formerly only useful for MS Windows DLLs) used throughout ACE/TAO. . The ACE_Reactor destructor will now call close() on the referenced reactor implementation. This assures that all handlers are notified before the ACE_Reactor object that's most likely referenced in these handlers is invalid. Although this should not be a user-visible change, it did catch some ACE tests off guard destroying reactor implementations and ACE_Reactor interfaces in the wrong order, so it may come up in the field as well. When using dynamically allocated reactor implementations, do not destroy the implementation object before the ACE_Reactor interface object. Use of the ACE_Reactor constructor's delete_implementation argument (with a value of 1) is recommended when dynamically allocating reactor implementations. . Improved performance of HTBP by not requiring a lookup of peer hostname. . Added new ACE_SizeCDR stream which allows one to calculate size of the representation without writing anything. . Number of improvements in RMCast, reliable multicast implementation. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.3 and ACE-5.4.4 ==================================================== . The ace-config script has been replaced by pkg-config metadata files which are installed in ${prefix}/lib/pkgconfig by the automake build. . Remove ACE_OS::gets() implementation. While this ACE implementation of gets() did not contain the security holes that all standard gets() implementations have, keeping it around only serves to foster confusion since (1) some may incorrectly assume that this ACE-specific gets() implementation has the same holes as standard ones, and (2) invoking it with a default size argument so that it looks like a standard gets() call results in behavior that is different from the standard. Use ACE_OS::fgets() instead. . Removed ACE_Unbounded_Set_Ex, this gave the false idea that it had thread safe iterators. Use ACE_Unbounded_Set instead . Improved VxWorks support for static libraries. Shared libraries do cause several known problems which will be fixed in the x.4.5 release. . Removed the usage of the ACE_x_cast macros, we are using the C++ casts from now on. The ACE_x_cast macros are deprecated and will be removed after the x.5.1 release . Some improvements in autoconf support; better detection of available OS and compiler features. . Fixed bugs in ACE TSS emulation USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.2 and ACE-5.4.3 ==================================================== . Improved Cygwin 1.5.12 support, 90% of the tests now succeed . Improved OpenVMS support. . Added ability to use fltk with Cygwin/MinGW . Added ACE_INT64 that defines a native 64 bit type. . Added 'q' as usable specifier for ACE_Log_Msg to print out int64 bit number. . Added better support for Intel C++ compilers. . Improved HPUX support. . Added a new directory ("ACE_wrappers/protocols/ace") for new protocols that are not directly components of ACE, but are relate to ACE and defined a new protocol, HTBP (Hypertext Tunneling, Bidirectional Protocol) providing ACE_Acceptor/Connector/Stream semantics over a connection owned by an HTTP proxy. Test cases in ACE_wrappers/tests/HTBP provide examples of use. . Performace enhancement in TP_Reactor's handle_timer_events method [Bug 1971]. . Various changes to permit ACE to execute on HP NonStop platform (e.g support for its pthreads version). . Updated HP NonStop configuration files (config-tandem-nsk). . The "ACE" pseudo-namespace is now a true C++ namespace. Transitional pseudo-namespaces that were only meant to be used internally by ACE, such as "ACE_Sock_Connect", no longer exist. . ACE_CDR::Boolean type is now a true C++ "bool" on all platforms except MSVC++ 6. We plan to deprecate MSVC++ 6 support sometime after the x.5 release of ACE+TAO+CIAO, so we recommend you start migrating to a later version of MSVC++. . More GNU g++ 3.4.x fixes. . Added ICMP and "ping" socket support. . Added mkstemp() emulation. . Fixed problem on Linux < 2.5.47 platforms where equality comparison of two logically equal sockaddr_in structure instances would incorrectly fail. . Support for wide characters has been improved on non-Windows platforms. . A number of Windows CE problems have been fixed. . ACE's loading of DLLs (for example, as a result of loading synamic services) has been changed to use the native OS's facilities for locating the DLL instead of searching LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or its equivalent) then loading the DLL using a full pathname. This restores enforcement of a platform's loading and security policy. To use the old DLL locating method, add ACE_MUST_HELP_DLOPEN_SEARCH_PATH to your config.h file before building ACE. . A number of errors in the APG example programs have been corrected. . Select_Reactor and Priority_Reactor performance improved. [Bug 1890] . Wide-char functionality on POSIX (Linux, etc.) . TSS memory leak fixes [Bug 1542] . Ported to HPUX 11i v2 on Itanium . Added code to ACE for platform RedHat AS 3.0 on Opteron. . Changed ACE::crc32() family of functions to NOT fold in the length of the string/buffer/iovec into the CRC. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4.1 and ACE-5.4.2 ==================================================== . Support for g++ 3.4.1. . All ACE Makefiles, project files, etc, are now generated by OCI's "MakeProjectCreator" (MPC) tool. Makefiles and project files for commonly used configurations have been pre-generated and distributed with the beta(s). Please see: $ACE_ROOT/ACE-INSTALL.html for information on how to use MPC with ACE. . Improved Doxygen documentation. . Reduced header file dependencies, which should speedup compilation and help minimize static footprint. . ACE now requires support for the following standard C++ features: - "bool" keyword - "mutable" keyword - "explicit" keyword - C++ casts (e.g. static_cast<>, reinterpret_cast<>, dynamic_cast<> and const_cast<>) If you're using a compiler that does NOT support these features please contact Steve Huston for support. . Changed the select()-based reactor implementations to scan for broken handles to remove based on the registered handles, not on event handlers. This allows for bad handles to be removed from the reactor even if the event handler doesn't implement get_handle() the way we expect. . Support for Pthreads native recursive mutexes was added. This capability is specified to ACE_OS::mutex_init() as an optional argument, lock_type. To fix confusion from an earlier attempt to add this functionality, the meaning of the old 'type' argument to ACE_OS::thread_mutex_init() is changed. It previously combined the scope and type. Now it is just the type (e.g. recursive), as the scope is inherent in the method used. For clarification on ACE_HAS_RECURSIVE_MUTEXES, it means that the platform is capable of them, not that they always are, as one would expect. However, before Pthreads had recursion added, it was never optional. Now it is. . Initial support for new Linux sys_epoll() interface in Dev_Poll_Reactor. The obsolete Linux /dev/epoll interface is no longer supported. . Improved Cygwin support. - Threading works without problems. - Problems with shared memory, process shared mutexes, multicast and some other small things still exist. . New OpenVMS port. - This is for the latest version of OpenVMS with all available ECOs applied. Basic stuff works without problems. Advanced features still need some work. . Usage of ASYS_INLINE is deprecated in ACE. Use ACE_INLINE instead. . All inline source files now end in ".inl". The previous ".i" extension is generally used for preprocessed C sources. . Autoconf support has been improved and fixed on a number of platforms, including the BSD variants (e.g. FreeBSD). It is still not the preferred way to configure most platforms, but it is ready for wider testing. Please report any problems found to ace-bugs@cs.wustl.edu. . A number of fixes were made to quiet compile errors and warnings on 64-bit Windows. . For builds on AIX using Visual Age C++, the make rtti option default was changed to 1, enabling RTTI by default. . ACE_Service_Repository::remove() has a new, optional argument that can receive the service record pointer for the removed service. If the pointer is returned to the caller, it is not deleted. If the pointer is not returned to the caller (the default) it is deleted (this is the historic behavior). . The tutorials in ACE_wrappers/docs have been removed. They were not being maintained and caused confusion in a number of cases. Now that there are complete examples that match the printed books (C++NPv1, C++NPv2, APG), the older tutorials are no longer useful. Please see $ACE_ROOT/examples/C++NPv1/ $ACE_ROOT/examples/C++NPv2/ $ACE_ROOT/examples/APG/ for the source code of the examples in those books. . ACE_String_Base::fast_clear() is a new method which sets the string length to 0. Doesn't release string-allocated memory, but if the memory was externally supplied, it is no longer referenced from the string object. . A true C++ "bool" is now used as the CDR stream boolean type, if supported by the compiler. . Renamed AIX 5L configuration header from config-aix5.1.h to config-aix-5.x.h. . All C++ equality, relational and logical operators now return bool instead of int, as is the norm for modern C++. . Added new ACE_OS::realpath() implementation. Contributed by Olli Savia USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.4 and ACE-5.4.1 ==================================================== ACE --- . Fixed "make install" support in ACE+autoconf configurations. . Fixed autoconf support on Solaris. . Corrected invalid `aux' directory (on MS Windows) found in ACE distribution. . ACE/TAO build now without problems with MinGW and all ACE tests run now without problems . Added some more support for the new CBuilderX Preview compiler, this is not 100% ready yet because the compiler is still a preview and has its own problems. . Added Visual SlickEdit 8.1 MPC template . Added workaround for compile problems in Borland Release builds . Cygwin 1.5.9 is now supported . Tests for IPV6 have been added . Implement lstat() so that it'll use stat() on platforms that don't support lstat(). . Problems related to ACE_Event_Handler usage in WFMO_Reactor was fixed. . A wrapper for rmdir () has been added. . Threads spawned in thread-per-connection mode never inherited the priority. This problem was fixed and this fix is consistent with the C++ NPV* books. . Fixed memory leaks with ACE_String_Base::resize () . Enable the usage of native recursive mutexes for the implementation of ACE recursive mutexes on Linux. . The ACE Proactor framework can now be enabled for AIX 5.2. Since AIO functionality is not run-time enabled by default on AIX 5.2, the ACE Proactor code is not built by default on AIX. To enable it, the config.h file must contain #define ACE_HAS_AIO_CALLS before including the config-aix-5.1.h file. . The ACE_POSIX_CB_Proactor implementation is now built on all platforms except LynxOS. USER VISIBLE CHANGES BETWEEN ACE-5.3.6 and ACE-5.4 ================================================== ACE: --- . Added a new makefile commandline flag, static_link, that can be used to force static linking when static_libs_only is turned on. It uses the new STATIC_LINK_FLAG variable and is currently only implemented for for GNU ld, i.e., it adds the "-static" option to LDFLAGS. It's turned off by default since using it causes the footprint to go up by almost 1 MB on Linux, since it links all the system and compiler .a files, but can be turned on if users want/need to use it, by enabling both static_libs_only and static_link. . Added macros ACE_USES_GPROF which enables users to use gprof in a multithreaded environment with ACE libs. . Added a new functor template class, ACE_Malloc_Lock_Adapter_T, that's used by ACE_Malloc_T as a factory for the ACE_LOCK template parameter, and allows the use of locking strategy classes, like ACE_Process_Semaphore and ACE_Thread_Semaphore that don't have a satisfactory ctor taking a single required ACE_TCHAR* parameter, to be adapted to work with ACE_Malloc_T. . The source code examples from "The ACE Programmer's Guide" book by Huston, Syyid, and Johnston, are now located in $ACE_ROOT/examples/APG. . Support for GNU autoconf is now in ACE. Please see ACE-INSTALL.html for details. . Fixed problems that prevented ACE from being compiled on LynxOS 4.0.0. . Fixed compilation error which prevented ACE from being compiled when ACE_COMPILE_TIMEPROBES was set to 1. . Preliminary support for Tandem NSK has been added. . Lots of bug fixes with TLI and XPG5. Please see $ACE_ROOT/ChangeLog for details. . Fixed ACE_OS::event_timedwait() and ACE_OS::event_wait() so that they use a while loop around the ACE_OS::cond_[timed]wait() calls to avoid problems with spurious wakeups, etc. . ACE's wrapper around getipnodebyname() and getipnodebyaddr () has been made go through the IPv4-only case on ACE_WIN32. Since Windows IPv6 implementation doesn't offer support (at thistime) for getipnodebyname() the code has been changed to use the IPV4 part of the code. . Install with Borland C++ of ACE library fixed ACEXML: ------- . Fixed memory leak in ACEXML parser. . Fixed implementations of rewind() in all the CharStreams. They were broken previously. . Fixed bugs in the parser associated with incorrect handling of PE References for keywords.