Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [17]
Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians will find that a range of popular commercial products are available for Linux, such as Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and Simulink. Other commercial applications for Linux include high-end CAD systems, network management tools, firewalls, and software development environments.
Programming Languages and Utilities
Linux provides a complete Unix programming environment, including all the standard libraries, programming tools, compilers, and debuggers that you would expect to find on other Unix systems. The most commonly used compiler on Linux is the GNU's Compiler Collection, or gcc. gcc is capable of compiling C, C++, Objective C (another object-oriented dialect of C), Chill (a programming language mainly used for telecommunications), FORTRAN, and Java. Within the Unix software development world, applications and systems programming is usually done in C or C++, and gcc is one of the best C/C++ compilers around, supporting many advanced features and optimizations.
Java is an object-oriented programming language and runtime environment that supports a diverse range of applications such as web page applets, Internet-based distributed systems, database connectivity, and more. Java is fully supported under Linux. Several vendors and independent projects have released ports of the Java Development Kit for Linux, including Sun, IBM, and the Blackdown Project (which did one of the first ports of Java for Linux). Programs written for Java can be run on any system (regardless of CPU architecture or operating system) that supports the Java Virtual Machine. A number of Java "just in time" (or JIT ) compilers are available, and the IBM and Sun Java Development Kits (JDKs) for Linux come bundled with high-performance JIT compilers that perform as well as those found on Windows or other Unix systems.
Some of the most popular and interesting tools associated with Java are open source. These include Eclipse, an integrated development environment (IDE) that is extendable to almost anything through plugins; JBoss, an implementation of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) that has actually gone through the expense of becoming certified after a complaint by Sun Microsystems; and Gluecode, another application platform company bought by IBM in May 2005.
gcc is also capable of compiling Java programs directly to executables, and includes limited support for the standard JDK libraries.
Besides C, C++, and Java, many other compiled and interpreted programming languages have been ported to Linux, such as Smalltalk, FORTRAN, Pascal, LISP, Scheme, and Ada. In addition, various assemblers for writing machine code are available. An important open source project sponsored by Novell has developed an environment called Mono that provides support for Microsoft's .NET environment on Unix and Linux systems. Perhaps the most important class of programming languages for Linux is the many scripting languages, including Perl (the script language to end all script languages), Python (the first scripting language to be designed as object-oriented from the ground up), and Ruby (a fiercely object-oriented scripting language that has been heralded as very good for rapid application development ).
Linux systems make use of the advanced gdb debugger, which allows you to step through a program to find bugs or examine the cause for a crash using a core dump. gprof, a profiling utility, will give you performance statistics for your program, letting you know where your program is spending most of its time. The Emacs and vim text editors provide interactive editing and compilation environments for various programming languages. Other tools that are available for Linux