I remember when DTrace was all the hype, I read an article Sun engineers published about the architecture. One thing that shocked me was how much stuff they had to touch in order to support this. One thing, AFAICR, was a really ugly hack in the linker so I asked on one of the Sun's forums if they feel a bit dirty after all these changes across the layers. They couldn't understand what I was talking about. They kept telling me that it is really reliable, they tested it very well, and I shouldn't worry.
I wish IBM will get a clue and follow with a similar thing for AIX along with XL C/C++ suite. Those things are way to expensive (XL C/C++ for AIX is over $3K) for open source developers to test their code.
I am doing the same with my company right now. We are developing and dual-licensing XML Schema to C++ compiler. Here are some things that I found effective:
SEO-optimize your product page.
Submit/list your product URL to/in all relevant places: DMOZ, Wikipedia, C++ Libraries List, etc.
Post to freshmeat. This helps in two respects: (1) potential users hear about your project and (2) a lot of editors for other places (like directory.fsf.org, softpedia.com, etc) monitor this place and will add your product to their database. Also make sure you release new versions of your product often (say once a month). This way you will have a regular appearance on the front page of freshmeat.net.
Announce your product on the relevant mailing lists and news groups. There is nothing wrong in posting a clearly-marked ([ANN]) announcement message once.
Monitor relevant mailing lists and news groups for problems that your product meant to solve.
Make sure you constantly think about new ways to market your product. Set yourself a goal, like every week I need to get listed in at least one relevant place and announce my product in at lest one relevant news group/mailing list.
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I remember when DTrace was all the hype, I read an article Sun engineers published about the architecture. One thing that shocked me was how much stuff they had to touch in order to support this. One thing, AFAICR, was a really ugly hack in the linker so I asked on one of the Sun's forums if they feel a bit dirty after all these changes across the layers. They couldn't understand what I was talking about. They kept telling me that it is really reliable, they tested it very well, and I shouldn't worry.
Well, if you are really into compactness here, then
C++: ifstream in("foo.in");
I wish IBM will get a clue and follow with a similar thing for AIX along with XL C/C++ suite. Those things are way to expensive (XL C/C++ for AIX is over $3K) for open source developers to test their code.