Resources

At Synesis Software, we ascribe to the philosophy of "pay-it-forward", and provide various resources for the advancement of the craft of software development free-of-charge.

As well as authoring numerous articles, columns, and books on software development, we also provide a number of software libraries, tools and utilities.

Libraries

Synesis Software provide a number of important (and some not-so-important) software libraries:

Library Description Training? Additional ...

Pantheios

C/C++ Diagnostic Logging API

Two related training courses are offered:

Beginners Pantheios
Advanced Pantheios

We believe that Pantheios is the best C++ diagnostic logging API library ever created, for the following reasons:

  • The C++ API is 100% type-safe, something no library based on printf() or IOStreams insertion operators can ever be.
  • It is infinitely extensible to work with your application types
  • It's several times faster than other libraries when logging is switched on
  • It's up to two orders of magnitude faster than other libraries when logging is switched on
  • It is readily adapted to work with existing diagnostic logging libraries (ACE, log4cxx, etc.)
  • It allows you to get eliminate #ifdef DEBUG from yourapplication code forever

Pantheios is in use in very-high-performance systems throughout the world.

FastFormat

C++ Formatting Library

Two related training courses are offered:

Beginners FastFormat
Advanced FastFormat

We believe that FastFormat is the best C++ formatting library ever created, for the following reasons:

  • It is 100% type-safe, something no library based on sprintf() or IOStreams insertion operators can ever be.
  • It is infinitely extensible to work with your application types
  • It is infinitely extensible to write output to any type
  • It's faster than all other formatting libraries (except for a few corner cases wherein sprintf() is faster)

You can read about the design principles and implementation techniques of FastFormat in a three-part series of articles in the ACCU's peer-reviewed journal Overload:

STLSoft

C & C++ library collection

Three related training course are offered:

The STLSoft Showcase
Extending STL
High-performance Programming in C++

The STLSoft libraries provide STL extensions and facades over operating-system and third-party-library APIs. The libraries are 100% header-only.

The libraries are divided into sub-projects, according to technology area, including the following:

ACESTL - STL extensions over the ACE library ATLSTL - STL extensions over the ATL library
COMSTL - STL extensions for COM MFCSTL - STL extensions over the MFC library
UNIXSTL - STL extensions for UNIX APIs WinSTL - STL extensions for Windows APIs

STLSoft also provides compiler/platform/feature discrimination essential to the simple implementation of other libraries. As such, it is a required library for several other Synesis Software libraries, including FastFormat, Pantheios, recls, and VOLE.

recls

Platform-indepent recursive search library (multiple languages)

not currently offered

recls is a C/C++ library that provides recursive file-system search, and offers bindings for C#/.NET, D, Python, Ruby and STL.

VOLE

C++ COM Automation Wrapper Library

not currently offered

VOLE provides strong-type safety, high expressiveness, and a natural C++ syntax for manipulating COM Automation servers.

With VOLE, it is possible to achieve reductions in lines-of-code by ratios or 10:1 or more.

b64

Base-64 Conversion Library (C, with C++ API)

not currently offered

b64 is an efficient and highly modular Base-64 conversion library. (In release build, the core C library has zero dependencies, not even to the C standard library!)

UNIXem

UNIX API Emulatation C Library

not currently offered

UNIXem is a simple library that emulates a useful subset of the UNIX system APIs on Windows.

Note: UNIXem is the only library provided by Synesis Software that is not production-quality. It is appropriate for research, such as when developing tests for cross-platform software.

Tools

A number of useful system tools for Windows and Linux are available free-of-charge.

Utilities

Synesis Software's Windows Shell Extensions - plug-ins to Windows' Explorer shell, that provide useful operations on files, directories and other shell objects - are available free-of-charge via the separate website www.shellext.com