Ecolab 4.0 available

[Russell Standish]

FYI,
        Ecolab 4.0 has now been released, which you can see at
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/ecolab . It is a simulation
environment based on C++ and TCL with some of the same capability as
Swarm, and a lot of the same philosophy. I won't argue the toss over
whether C++ is a sensible simulation language - some C++ features such as
operator overloading happen to be very important to me.

The new object descriptor technology added into this release gives C++
the "object reflection" capability of Objective C. Although it hasn't
been done at this stage, it would be feasible to use this to integrate
C++ tightly into Swarm - namely export C++ objects into Objective
C. Exporting Obj C objects into C++ ought to be fairly simple.

Note it is not clear whether this strategy is better or worse than the
COM strategy currently being pursued by Marcus. I guess I'll have to
do the relevant experiements someday, but not for a little while. I've
a backlog of other projects.

                                                Cheers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Russell Standish                     Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967                    
UNSW SYDNEY 2052                         Fax   9385 6965                    
Australia                                address@hidden             
Room 2075, Red Centre                    http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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