Recent technical advances in relativistic atomic structure calculation will be discussed with particular reference to the GRASP and SWIRLES codes of the speaker and his collaborators. The capabilities of GRASP—2, the modernized version of the Oxford MCDF code, based on finite difference numerical techniques, will be illustrated by applications which could not have been studied with earlier codes. The SWIRLES code, which is based on a novel technique for expressing wave functions as a sum of S—spinor basis functions, is ideally suited to vector—processing computers, and is intended to study relativistic correlation and radiative corrections.Some results obtained with a new relativistic Dirac R‐matrix code will also be presented.