Last Friday we published Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks and then on Monday they were joined by Ubuntu 9.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6 benchmarks. One of the requests that has come up since publishing those articles are to carry out a set of tests comparing the performance of LLVM and LLVM-GCC.

With the recent release of GCC 4.5 and the forthcoming release of LLVM 2.7 that is expected in the coming days, we have decided to see how the performance of GCC compares to that of LLVM.

On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code.

Clang, the C/Objective-C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine, and LLVM itself have a lot to be proud of lately. LLVM 2.7 was recently released with many new features, LLVM now has its own libstdc++ replacement, and LLVM is finding itself used in many places from a JIT engine in a Flash player to providing software acceleration in Gallium3D.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53% of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit.

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.6 release. This includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug information generation and a broad number of new features in the core infrastructure.

Syntext, Inc. is happy to announce the release of Serna Free Open Source XML Editor! Serna is a powerful, easy-to-use WYSIWYG XML editor based on open standards for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris/SPARC.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce the arrival of KOffice 2.2.0, half a year after version 2.1 was released. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. There are two reasons for this very high development rate. Firstly, people have started to notice KOffice again and the developer community is growing.

Version 2.6 of LLVM, the Low-Level Virtual Machine, has been released.