The KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters. The KDE e.V. is for example responsible for paying the servers that run our GitLab instance and all our other web services. The e.V. takes care of sponsoring developer sprints and contributor travel costs, too. You did participate at some Akademy? This wouldn’t have been possible without the KDE e.V., both by sponsoring and helping to organize the event!

I tried to compile the Picolibc that uses the Meson build system with CompCert. The CompCert install I tried uses the GNU/GCC toolchain for preprocessing and linking. That makes the compiler relatively compatible to a GCC, beside that not all command line options are supported. I was used to CMake projects and there it is normally enough to just set CC=ccomp and you are ready and set (at least if you use the GNU/GCC toolchain).

I bought a MacBook end of 2014. My initial reason to buy it was to improve the Kate port for macOS. Beside that, I wanted to try if the Apple ecosystem and macOS are really that great and will solve all my issues in life (short answer: no, they aren’t, at least not for me). The HiDPI screen looked nice, too :=) After some initial “not a lot works”, if you don’t go the Homebrew or MacPorts way, the Kate port improved over the following years.

At work we use the LLVM/clang libraries for pre-processing and parsing C/C++ stuff. During some experimenting with the current master version of these libraries, I stumbled on unexpected crashes inside our unit-tests on Windows. We work with MSVC 2019 on Windows and all worked fine with LLVM 9.x, but with master, close to all my tests did now segfault in aligned_free. I first thought that might be some current regression in LLVM master, but after tracing it back to having DenseSet/Map crashing during destruction, this seemed unlikely.

What is a High DPI Display? In the past, most displays had (or the OS pretended to have) around 96 PPI, more or less. If you differed a bit and had too small/large UI elements, you mostly just resized your default font size a bit and were kind of happy. In the last years, more and more displays arise that have a much higher PPI values, which allows for e.g. very crisp rendering of text.

KDE applications on Windows? One of the new goals of KDE is to spread the use of the applications created by the KDE community. This doesn’t only include the use of them on Linux & other Unix-like operating systems, but Windows, too. The Successes :) The KDE community has some successfully cross-platform applications out there, like Krita and GCompris. The teams behind these applications did some great job to both develop & market them for all operating systems, including Windows.