The next major version of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), 14.1, was released on May 7 2024. Like every major GCC release, this version brings many additions, improvements, bug fixes, and new features.

"Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ (3rd Edition)", aka PPP3, is an introduction to programming for people who have never programmed before. It will also be useful for people who have programmed a bit and want to improve their style and technique - or simply learn modern C++. It is designed for classroom use, but written with an eye on self study. Ealier versions of this book have been used as the basis for first programming classes for electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students at Texas A&M University and in many other places. People who have seen PPP2 will notice that PPP3 is about half its size. What I have done to keep the weight down is to - strengthen the foundational chapters usually covered in a one-semester course, utilizing key parts of C++20 and C+23, and re-basing the Graphics/GUI chapter code on Qt for portability (e.g., to browsers and phones). - placed the more specialized chapters (known as "broadening the view" in PPP2) on the Web for people to use as needed. See below. - eliminate the pure reference material. You now can find more and more up-to-date material on the web, e.g. cppreference.com.

The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the immediate availability of the OpenXR™ 1.1 specification. This release evolves the widely adopted OpenXR open API standard for high-performance, cross-platform access to VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) — collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. OpenXR 1.1 consolidates widely used API extensions into the core specification to reduce fragmentation and adds new functionality to streamline the development of more powerful and efficient XR applications. In particular, OpenXR 1.1 consolidates multiple vendor extensions for key functionality to reduce differences in application code across multiple platforms, while still remaining flexible and extensible to foster innovation in a rapidly growing and evolving market. The OpenXR Working Group will focus on managing a pipeline of extensions to develop and seek feedback on new functionality, while proactively integrating proven technology into the core specification to provide developers with robust cross-platform XR capabilities. Today, most major XR platforms have transitioned to using OpenXR to expose current and future device capabilities. Vendors with conformant OpenXR implementations include Acer, ByteDance, Canon, HTC, Magic Leap, Meta, Microsoft, Sony, XREAL, Qualcomm, Valve, Varjo, and Collabora’s Monado open source runtime. OpenXR is also supported by all the major game and rendering engines, including Autodesk VRED, Blender, Godot, NVIDIA’s Omniverse, StereoKit, Unreal Engine, and Unity. The OpenXR 1.1 specification can be found on the Khronos website and on GitHub OpenXR Registry.

While the task of writing a brand new standard-compliant browser engine is infamous as being almost unachievable nowadays (and certainly so with Chromium coming in at 31 million lines of code), the Rust ecosystem has been brewing up a new web rendering engine called Servo. Initially created by Mozilla in 2012, Servo is still being developed today, now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation. At KDAB they managed to embed the Servo web engine inside Qt, by using their CXX-Qt library as a bridge between Rust and C++. This means that we can now use Servo as an alternative to Chromium for webviews in Qt applications.

Qt 6.7 is out with lots of large and small improvements for all of us who like to have fun when building modern applications and user experiences. Several additions are released as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything ready for the next LTS release!

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available.

There’s been a lot of noise recently about contributing to Open Source. Many developers contribute to Open Source projects for various reasons, including building their commit history for recruiters or gaining visibility through badges. However, experienced Open Source contributors have observed a troubling trend: contributing is seen as an obligation and a badge of honor, leading to frustration when it’s not straightforward.

Andrzej Janik has released ZLUDA 3, a new version of his open-source project that enables GPU-based applications designed for NVIDIA GPUs to run on other manufacturers’ hardware. The wrapper technology is designed to enable existing applications to run on new hardware unmodified, without the need for any work on their developers’ part.

Release 14.2 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Go, Rust, and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants. GDB is free (libre) software. GDB 14.2 brings the following fixes and enhancements over GDB 14.1: * PR symtab/31112 (DLL export forwarding is broken) * PR c++/31128 (gdb crashes when trying to print a global variable stub without a running inferior) * PR tdep/31254 ([gdb/tdep, arm] FAIL: gdb.threads/staticthreads.exp: up 10) * PR gdb/31256 (Crash with basic 'list .') * PR python/31366 (Frame.static_link() segfaults)

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension. The VK_NV_raw_access_chains extemsion should allow for more efficient shaders compiled from HLSL sources.

Extensions available in RISC-V enable the customizations that make it ideal as a basis for open innovation. Here’s the extension situation as it stands today.

This tutorial will teach you how to use the OpenXR API. OpenXR is an API managed by the Khronos Group which provides a cross-platform way for applications to interact with immersive devices. This includes virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) devices, motion controllers and more.

Eight years after launching the Vulkan database to the public, it’s approaching 30,000 uploaded reports from more than 3,300 different devices across Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS and iOS. With that much data available, good filtering capabilities are crucial.

We are excited to announce that with the latest release of Steam Audio, the complete source code of the Steam Audio SDK is now available as open source. With this release, our goal is to provide more control to developers, which will lead to better experiences for their users, and hopefully valuable contributions back to the wider community of developers using Steam Audio.

With this step, we are opening Qt SVG up to support elements beyond SVG Tiny 1.2. This means that we will aim to include useful and common elements from SVG 1.1 and SVG 2.0, if maintenance is reasonably feasible. We will not aim for compliance with these standards but we will keep an eye on feature requests from our users. Further, we are open to contributions of such extensions by the community. So if you miss your favorite SVG element in the list above, fell free to send us some code, preferably on our code review platform.

It used to be tricky to run GDB and connect Valgrind to it, but that’s not the case any more. The 3.21.0 Valgrind release brings new great features that allow using it and GDB much more easily and conveniently in a single terminal.

This site gathers together several key [Vulkan](https://vulkan.org/) documents including specifications, guides, tutorials and samples into a single site allowing for easy cross-searching and cross-linking across documents to help navigate quickly to the information you need for developing Vulkan-based applications.