One of the cool new features of the upcoming C++ (0x) standard is support for lambda expressions, providing functional-style inline function declarations. After seeing Herb Sutter’s PDC 2010 webcast on lambdas, I wanted to try this out on Swiften, the XMPP library behind Swift. I adapted the introductory EchoBot example from XMPP: The Definitive Guide, and ported it from Python to a C++ application using Swiften. The result is surprisingly clean.

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Qt does a great job at abstracting out platform-specific features into platform-independent C++ APIs. However, sometimes you still need to write platform-specific code for features that are not in Qt (e.g. to access the platform's address book),  or to access platform-specific applications (e.g. iTunes) or libraries (e.g. Sparkle). On Mac OS X, almost all interfaces are offered through the Cocoa Objective-C interface, and the interfaces that are written in C++ have been deprecated and will disappear soon in favor of Cocoa. Although the language of Cocoa is different from Qt's, Qt and GCC make it very easy to call these interfaces from within your application. In this post, I will show how this can be done by making an auto-updating application using Sparkle.

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