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Last week, Google brought the popular coding competitions Code Jam, HashCode and Kick Start together on a single website. This brand new UI will make the navigation better to make it user friendly. The user profile will now show notifications which will make the user experience better. Code Jam Google’s global coding competition, Code Jam, gives an opportunity to programmers around the world to solve tricky algorithmic puzzles. The first round includes three sub rounds. Next, the top 1,500 participants from each sub-round then get a chance to compete for a spot in round 2. Top 1,000 contestants are chosen out of them and they get an opportunity to move to the third round. Top 25 contestants will get selected from the third round and they will compete for the finals. The winners get the championship title and $15,000. HashCode HashCode is a team-based programming challenge organized by Google for students and professionals around the world. After registering for the contest, the participants will get an access to the Judge System. The Judge System is an online platform where one can form the team, join a hub, practice, and compete during the rounds. One can choose their team and programming language and the HashCode team assigns an engineering problem to the teams by live streaming on Youtube. The teams can compete either from a local hub or any another location of their choice. The selected teams will compete for the final round at Google’s office. Kick Start Kick Start, also a global online coding competition, consists of a variety of algorithmic challenges designed by Google engineers. Participants can either participate in one of the online rounds or in all of them. The top participants will get a chance to be interviewed at Google. The best part about KickStart is that it is open to all participants and there is no pre-qualification needed. If you are competing in a coding competition for the first time, then KickStart is the best option. What can you expect with this unified interface? Some good competition and some amazing insights coming from each of the rounds. Personalized certificate of completion. A chance to practice coding and experience new challenges A lot of opportunities To stay updated with the registration dates and details, one can sign up on Google’s coding competition’s official page. To know more about the competitions, check out Google’s blog. Google hints shutting down Google News over EU’s implementation of Article 11 or the “link tax” Recode Decode #GoogleWalkout interview shows why data and evidence don’t always lead to right decisions in even the world’s most data-driven company Google Dart 2.1 released with improved performance and usability

Last week, Nick Craver, Architecture Lead for Stack Overflow, announced that Stack Exchange is migrating to .NET Entity Framework Core (EF Core) and seek help from users to test the EF Core. The Stack Exchange community has deployed a major migration from its previous Linq-2-SQL to EF Core. Following this, Stack Overflow may also get a partial tier to deploy later today. In his post, Nick said, “Along the way we have to swap out parts that existed in the old .NET world but don't in the new.” Some changes in Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow post migration to .NET EF Core The Stack community said that they have safely diverged their Enterprise Q3 release. This means they work on one codebase for easier maintenance and the latest features will also be reflected in the .NET Entity Framework Core. Stack Overflow was written on top of a data layer called Linq-2-SQL. This worked well but had scaling issues following which the community replaced the performance critical paths with a library named as Dapper. However, the community said that until today, some old paths, mainly where they insert entries, remained on Linq-2-SQL. The community also stated that as a part of the migration, a few code paths went to Dapper instead of EF Core. This means Dapper wasn’t removed and still exists post migration. This migration may affect posts, comments, users, and other ‘primary’ object types in Q&A. Nick also added, “We're not asking for a lot of test data to be created on meta here, but if you see something, please say something!”. He further added, “The biggest fear with a change like this is any chance of bad data entering the database, so while we've tested this extensively and have done a few tests deploys already, we're still being extra cautious with such a central & critical change.” To know more about this in detail, head over to Nick Craver’s discussion thread on Stack Exchange. .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Framework 4.8 more details announced .NET Core 2.0 reaches end of life, no longer supported by Microsoft Stack Overflow celebrates its 10th birthday as the most trusted developer community

Scratch 3.0 was released yesterday. Scratch is an environment aimed to teach basic programming logic to kids with blocks and cartoon-ish characters and scenes. Yesterday, Scratch 3.0 officially became a part of the Scratch online community. Scratch 3.0 new features There are various new sprites, backgrounds, and sounds for users to play with. A new extension library lets users add new sets of blocks that connect to hardware and software components to do more tasks with Scratch A new sound editor New programming blocks Support for tablets, hence the blocks in Scratch 3.0 are bigger Users can add collections of extra blocks the developers call ‘extensions’ Among existing blocks new ones are added for sound effects, operators to make string operations easier, new pen blocks and a new glide block to move a sprite. The paint editor has a new layout that increases the visibility of tools and options, an eraser tool, more color options, better control over vector points, more controls for ordering layers, and new gradient controls. With the sound editor in Scratch 3.0, you can now record sounds, trim audio with more ease, and explore new sound effects. General reactions to Scratch Comments from Hacker news are positive for Scratch: “Scratch is pretty great, and at least 3 of my kids constantly ask if they can play Scratch.” “Scratch (and similar programming environments) is a very successful way to introduce children to programming and I hope that it continues to do so.” Any of your old projects can be found at https://scratch.mit.edu/mystuff/. You can check out Scratch at the MIT website. Ruby 2.6.0 released with a new JIT compiler Python governance vote results are here: The steering council model is the winner NumPy drops Python 2 support. Now you need Python 3.5 or later.

The ISO C++ Committee met last week at Cologne, Germany to complete and publish the Committee Draft (CD) of the next C++ standard called C++20. This standard will bring some of the game-changing advancements to C++ including modules, concepts, coroutines, and ranges to C++. Here are some of the changes made to the draft in this meeting: Contracts moved out of C++20 A contract specifies a set of preconditions, postconditions, and assertions that a software component should adhere to. The committee unanimously decided to move contracts out of C++20 and defer it to a later standard because it has recently gone through major design changes. They were unsure of the impact or implications of these changes as they did not have much usage experience with contracts. “In short, contracts were just not ready. It's better for us to ship contracts in a form that better addresses the use cases of interest in a future standard instead of shipping something we are uncertain about in C++20. Notably, this decision was unanimous -- all of the contracts’ co-authors agreed to this approach,” wrote the committee. To continue the work on contracts a new study group is created named SG21. It will be chaired by John Spicer from Edison Design Group and includes all original authors and members who are interested to work on contracts. std::format, a new text formatting API One of the key advantages of the ‘printf’ syntax is its familiarity among developers. However, it does suffer from a few drawbacks. The format specifiers it provides like hh, h, l, and j are redundant in type-safe formatting. They can unnecessarily make specification and parsing complicated. The printf syntax also does not provide a standard way for extending the syntax for user-defined types. C++20 will come with a new text formatting API called ‘std::format’ that aims to offer a flexible, safe, and fast alternative to (s)printf and iostreams. Based on the syntax we see in Python, the .NET family of languages, and Rust, it uses ‘{‘ and ‘}’ as replacement field delimiters instead of %. The C++20 synchronization library This new standard will bring new improved synchronization and thread coordination facilities. It will support efficient ‘atomic’ waiting and semaphores, latches, barriers, atomic_flag::test, lockfree integral types, and more. The next step for the committee is to submit the draft to all the national standard bodies to gather their feedback. The committee plans to address their feedback in the next two meetings and then publish the C++20 standard at the February 2020 meeting in Prague. Developers are excited about the new features C++20 will come with. A Reddit user commented, “Wow, the C++ committee is really doing a great job. There are so many good features coming into the standard (std::format, constexpr features, better threading support, etc, etc). Thank you all for all of your hard work.” Others are not very impressed by the ‘web_view’ proposal. This introduces a facility that aims to enable natural, multimodal user interaction with the help of existing web standards and technologies. Another user added, “Very surprising, I didn't expect that because personally, I think that the proposal is not very good. If we use JS and other technologies to display stuff, why not directly use those languages? Why go through C++? But maybe I don't understand it; I'll make sure to go through the minutes.” You can read the full report posted by the ISO C++ Committee for more details. ISO C++ Committee announces that C++20 design is now feature complete GCC 9.1 releases with improved diagnostics, simpler C++ errors and much more Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019  

After releasing Elixir 1.8 in January, the team behind Elixir announced the release of Elixir 1.9 yesterday. This comes with a new ‘releases’ feature, the Config API for streamlined configuration, plus many other enhancements and bug fixes. Elixir is a functional, concurrent, general-purpose programming language that runs on the Erlang VM. Releases, a single unit for code and the runtime Releases are the most important feature that has landed in this version. A release is a “self-contained directory” that encapsulates not only your application code and its dependencies but also the whole Erlang VM and runtime. So, basically, it allows you to precompile and package your code and runtime in a single unit. You can then deploy this single unit to a target that is running on the same OS distribution and version as the machine running the ‘mix release’ command. Following are some of the benefits ‘releases’ provide: Code preloading: As releases run in embedded mode for loading code it loads all the modules beforehand. This makes your system ready for handling requests right after booting. Configuration and customization: It gives you “fine-grained control” over system configuration and the VM flags for starting the system. Multiple releases: It allows you to assemble different releases of the same application with different configurations. Management scripts: It provides management scripts to start, restart, connect to the running system remotely, execute RPC calls, run in daemon mode, run in Windows service mode, and more. Releases are also the last planned feature for Elixir and the team is not planning to add any other user-facing feature in the near future. The Elixir team shared in the announcement, “Of course, it does not mean that v1.9 is the last Elixir version. We will continue shipping new releases every 6 months with enhancements, bug fixes, and improvements.” A streamlined configuration API This version comes with a more streamlined Elixir’s configuration API in the form of a new ‘Config’ module. Previously, the ‘Mix.Config’ configuration API was part of the Mix build tool. Beginning Elixir 1.9, the runtime configuration is now taken care of by ‘releases’ and Mix is no longer included in ‘releases’, this API is now ported to Elixir. “In other words, ‘use Mix.Config’ has been soft-deprecated in favor of import Config,” the announcement reads. Another crucial change in configuration is that starting from this release the ‘mix new’ command will not generate a ‘config/config.exs’ file. The ‘mix new --umbrella’ will also not generate a configuration for each child app as the configuration is now moved from individual umbrella application to the root of the umbrella. Many developers are excited about the ‘releases’ support. One user praised the feature saying, “Even without the compilation and configuration stuff, it's easier to put the release bundle in something basic like an alpine image, rather than keep docker image versions and app in sync.” However, as many of them currently rely on the Distillery tool for deployment they have some reservations about using releases as it lacks some of the features Distillery provides. “Elixir's `mix release` is intended to replace (or remove the need for) third-party packages like Distillery. However, it's not there yet, and Distillery is strictly more powerful at the moment. Notably, Elixir's release implementation does not support hot code upgrades. I use upgrades all the time, and won't be trying out Elixir's releases until this shortcoming is addressed,” a Hacker News user commented. Public opinion on Twitter was also positive: https://twitter.com/C3rvajz/status/1140351455691444225 https://twitter.com/rrrene/status/1143443465549897733 Why Ruby developers like Elixir How Change.org uses Flow, Elixir’s library to build concurrent data pipelines that can handle a trillion messages Introducing Mint, a new HTTP client for Elixir

Yesterday, the Nim team announced the release of Nim version 0.20.0. Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language, which successfully combines the concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. This is a massive release from Nim, with more than 1,000 commits. Nim version 0.20.0 is effectively Nim 1.0 RC1. The team has also mentioned that the stable release 1.0 will either be, the Nim 0.20.0 being promoted to 1.0 status or another release candidate, as there will be no more breaking changes. Also, version1.0 will be a long-term supported stable release and will only receive bug fixes and new features in the future, as long as it doesn't break backwards compatibility. New Features not is always a unary operator Stricter compile time checks for integer and float conversions Tuple unpacking for constant and for loop variables Hash sets and tables are initialized by default Better error message for case-statements The length of a table must not change during iteration Better error message for index out of bounds Changelog The Nim version 0.20.0 includes many changes affecting backwards compatibility. One of the changes is that strutils.editDistance has been deprecated, instead editdistance.editDistance or editdistance.editDistanceAscii to be used instead. One of the breaking changes in the standard library includes osproc.execProcess now also takes a workingDir parameter and std/sha1.secureHash will now accept openArray[char], and not string. There are few breaking changes in the compiler too. One of the main changes is that the compiler now implements the “generic symbol prepass” for when statements in generics. Library additions There are many new library additions in this release. Some of them are mentioned below: stdlib module std/editdistance as a replacement for the deprecated strutils.editDistance. stdlib module std/wordwrap as a replacement for the deprecated strutils.wordwrap. Added split, splitWhitespace, size, alignLeft, align, strip, repeat procs and iterators to unicode.nim. Added or for NimNode in macros Added system.typeof for more control over how type expressions can be deduced. Library changes Many changes have been made in the library. Some of them are mentioned below: The string output of macros.lispRepr proc has been tweaked slightly. The dumpLisp macro in this module now outputs an indented proper Lisp, devoid of commas. Added macros.signatureHash that returns a stable identifier derived from the signature of a symbol. In strutils empty strings now no longer match as substrings The Complex type is now a generic object and not a tuple anymore. The ospaths module is now deprecated, use os instead. Note that os is available in a NimScript environment but unsupported operations produce a compile-time error. Language additions There have been new additions to the language as well. Some of them are mentioned below: Vm support for float32<->int32 and float64<->int64 casts was added. There is a new pragma block noSideEffect that works like the gcsafe pragma block User defined pragmas are now allowed in the pragma blocks Pragma blocks are no longer eliminated from the typed AST tree to preserve pragmas for further analysis by macros. Language changes The standard extension for SCF (source code filters) files was changed from .tmpl to .nimf. Pragma syntax is now consistent. Previous syntax where type pragmas did not follow the type name is now deprecated. Also pragma before generic parameter list is deprecated to be consistent with how pragmas are used with a proc. Hash sets and tables are initialized by default. The explicit initHashSet, initTable, etc. are not needed anymore. Tool changes jsondoc now includes a moduleDescription field with the module description. jsondoc0 shows comments as its own objects as shown in the documentation. nimpretty: –backup now defaults to off instead of on and the flag was undocumented; use git instead of relying on backup files. koch now defaults to build the latest stable Nimble version unless you explicitly ask for the latest master version via --latest. Compiler changes The deprecated fmod proc is now unavailable on the VM A new --outdir option was added The compiled JavaScript file for the project produced by executing nim js will no longer be placed in the nimcache directory. The --hotCodeReloading has been implemented for the native targets. The compiler also provides a new more flexible API for handling the hot code reloading events in the code. The compiler now supports a --expandMacro:macroNameHere switch for easy introspection into what a macro expands into. The -d:release switch now does not disable runtime checks anymore. For a release build that also disables runtime checks use -d:release -d:danger or simply -d:danger. The Nim version 0.20.0 also contains many bug fixes. Most developers are quite delighted with the release of Nim version 0.20.0. A user on Hacker News states that “It's impressive. 1000 commits! Great job Nim team!” Another user comments, “I've been full steam on the Nim train for the past year. It really hits a sweet spot between semantic complexity and language power. If you've used any mainstream language and understand types, you already understand 80% of the semantics you need to be productive. But more advanced features (generics, algebraic data types, hygienic macros) are available when needed. Now that the language is approaching 1.0, the only caveat is a small ecosystem and community. Nim has completely replaced Node as my language of choice for side projects and prototyping.” While there are some users who still prefer Python, for its strong command language, a user says that “It seems to me that the benefits of Nim over Python are far smaller than the benefits of Python's library ecosystem. I'm pretty happy with Python though. It seems like Nim's benefits couldn't be that big. I consider Python "great", so the best Nim could be is "great-er", as a core language I mean. I've been rooting for Nim, but haven't actually tried it. And my use case is pretty small, I admit.” These are select few updates. More information on the Nim blog. Containers and Python are in demand, but Blockchain is all hype, says Skill Up developer survey Apple releases native SwiftUI framework with declarative syntax, live editing, and support of Xcode 11 beta Storm 2.0.0 releases with Java enabled architecture, new core and streams API, and more

The D Language front-end got finally merged into GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9, yesterday, as reported by Phoronix. The D language front-end is written in C++ and it supports the D 2.0 run-time and shared libraries. Iain Buclaw in his e-mail thread titled ‘Submission of D Front End’ says,  "The front-end is split into two parts. First being a standalone D language implementation that does the source file lexing, parsing and semantic analysis. Second being the binding layer that sits between GCC and the DMD front-end, doing the actual code generation.” Approval on the plan for merging D language front-end into GCC 9 According to a report by Phoronix, last year in June, the GCC Steering Committee had approved the plan of adding the D front-end. However, it took the project more than a year as a set of 13 patches of code, which is nearly 800k lines of code was worked upon and which had undergone revisions for getting the code in adequate shape for merging. Iain Buclaw from the GDC project took the initiative of posting these patches after carefully cleaning them up and also addressing the feedback he had received before. The patch series is available on GCC-patches. Updates on the future plan As per a report by Phoronix, Richard Biener of SUSE announced on 17th October that GCC's "stage 1" development will shift to "stage 3" on 11 November. It’s clear that the open feature development is over and the focus is now on bug-fixing. 6 January 2019 is the tentative date, to begin with the fixes. GCC 9.1, the initial GCC9 stable compiler release with GDC support is expected to be out around the end of the first quarter of 2019. Read more about this news on the official site of Phoronix. GCC 8.1 Standards released! What is a micro frontend? Frontend development with Bootstrap 4

Crystal is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language with support from over 300 contributors. Last Friday, Crystal 0.27.0 was released. Language changes in Crystal 0.27.0 From Crystal 0.27.0, if the arguments of a method call need to be splitted across multiple lines, the comma must be put at the end of the line just before the line break. This is more in line with other conventional languages. Better handling of stack overflows A program entering an infinite recursion or running out of space in the stack memory is known as a stack overflow. Crystal 0.27.0 ships with a boundary check that allows a better error message on stack overflow. Concurrency and parallelism changes The next releases should start showing parallelism. There are some steps in preparation for that. The Boehm GC has API that enables support for multithreading environment in v7.6.x. From this version of Crystal, GC 7.6.8 or greater is used. As Crystal 0.26.1 was shipped with v7.4.10, the dependency needed to be updated first so that the CI can compile the compiler with the new GC API. Also, refactoring was done to separate the responsibilities of Fiber, Event, Scheduler, and EventLoop. Arithmetic symbols added In Crystal 0.27.0, arithmetic operators like &+, &-, &* were added. They are for additions, subtraction and multiplication with wrapping. In one of the next versions, the regular operators will raise on overflow. This will allow users to trust the result of the operations when reaching the limits of the representable range. Collection names changed In Indexable module and Hash, there are some breaking changes. The Indexable#at was replaced in favor of Indexable#fetch. The API between Indexable and Hash is now more aligned in the latest version. This includes ways to deal with default values in case of a missing key. If no default value is needed, the #[] method must be used. This is true even for Hash, since Hash#fetch(key) was dropped. Time changes There are breaking changes to support cleaner and more portable names. All references to “epoch” should now be replaced to “unix”. Also effectively, Time#epoch was renamed to Time#to_unix, #epoch_ms to #unix_ms, and #epoch_f to #to_unix_f. ISO calendar week numbers are now supported. Changing the time zone while maintaining the wall clock is also easy. File changes Working with temporal files and directories needed the Tempfile class. Now the creation of such files are handled by File.tempfile or File.tempname. This change also tidies up the usage of prefix, suffix and default temp path. Platform support There was an issue detected in Boehm GC regarding while running in Google Cloud because. The fix for this will be released in the next version of GC. Meanwhile, a patch is included in Crystal 0.27.0. There is some preparation for Windows support related to processes, forking, file handlers and arguments. Other fixes include fixing signals between forked processes, and dealing how IO on a TTY behaves in different environments. Networking changes HTTP::Server#bind_ssl was dropped since #bind_tls was introduced. It wasn’t removed to avoid a breaking change. The bindings for OpenSSL were updated to support v1.1.1. Compiler changes Support for annotations inside enums is added. Calling super will by default forward all the method arguments. Even if the call was expanded by macros in this version. When using splats argument the type of values can be restricted. This also goes for the whole Tuple or NamedTuple that is expected as splatted arguments. A bug was present when these restrictions were used, now fixed. For a complete list of changes, visit the Crystal changelog. WebAssembly – Trick or Treat? Mozilla shares plans to bring desktop applications, games to WebAssembly and make deeper inroads for the future web The D language front-end support finally merged into GCC 9

This Monday, Matthias Bussonnier, a core developer of the IPython and Jupyter Project team, announced the release of IPython 7.3. Along with some major bug fixes, this release comes with the %conda and %pip magics and compatibility with Python 3.8. The %conda and %pip magics IPython offers magic functions as an added enhancement on top of the Python syntax that is intended to solve common problems like data analysis using Python. The biggest update the team has introduced to this release is the implementation of the %conda and %pip magics. These magics will automatically install packages into the kernel that is currently running in an IPython or Jupyter notebook session. The %pip magic was already available, but it was limited to printing a warning and now, it will actually forward commands to pip. Users will still need to restart the interpreter or kernel for the newly installed packages to be taken into account. Though this update is great, users are recommended to use the conda/pip commands as their preferred way for installing. Bug fixes This release is compatible with Python 3.8, which comes with the addition of Assignment Expressions, better thread safety, and more. To opt out of shell variable expansion, the `@magic.no_var_expand` decorator is added to the execution magics. The behavior of the %reset magic has been changed by initializing the posix aliases `clear`, `less`, `more`, and `man` during a reset. IPython command line now will allow running *.ipynb files. To read more about the updates in IPython 7.3, check out its official announcement. IPython 7.2.0 is out! IPython 7.0 releases with AsyncIO Integration and new Async libraries PyPy 7.0 released for Python 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 alpha

GNU Octave team released version 5.1.0 of the popular high-level programming language, last week. GNU Octave 5.1.0 comes with general improvements, dependencies, and other changes. What’s new in GNU Octave 5.1.0? General Improvements The Octave plotting system in GNU Octave 5.1.0 supports high-resolution screens (the ones with greater than 96 DPI such as HiDPI/Retina monitors). There’s a newly added Unicode character support for files and folders in Windows. The fsolve function is modified to use larger step sizes while calculating the Jacobian of a function with finite differences, thereby, leading to faster convergence. The ranks function is recoded for performance and has now become 25X faster. It also supports a third argument that can specify resolving the ranking of tie values. Another function randi has also been recoded to produce an unbiased (all results are equally likely) sample of integers. The function isdefinite now returns true or false instead of -1, 0, or 1. The intmax, intmin, and flintmax functions can now accept a variable as input. There is no longer a need for path handling functions to perform variable or brace expansion on path elements. Also, Octave’s load-path is no longer subject to these expansions. A new printing device is available, "-ddumb", that can produce ASCII art for plots. This device has been made available only with the gnuplot toolkit. Other Changes Dependencies: The GUI now requires Qt libraries in GNU Octave 5.1.0. The minimum Qt4 version that is supported is Qt4.8.The OSMesa library is no longer used. To print invisible figures while using OpenGL graphics, the Qt QOFFSCREENSURFACE feature must be available. The FFTW library should be able to perform FFT calculations. The FFTPACK sources are removed from Octave. Matlab Compatibility: The functions such as issymmetric and ishermitian now accept an option "nonskew" or "skew" for calculating the symmetric or skew-symmetric property of a matrix. The issorted function can now use a direction option of "ascend" or "descend". You can now use clear with no arguments and it will remove only local variables from the current workspace. Global variables will no longer be visible, but will exist in the global workspace. Graphic Objects: Figure graphic objects in GNU Octave 5.1.0 now have a new property "Number" which is read-only and that can return the handle (number) of the figure. But if "IntegerHandle" is set to "off" then the property will return an empty matrix []. Patch and surface graphic objects can now use the "FaceNormals" property for flat lighting. "FaceNormals" and "VertexNormals" can now be calculated only when necessary to improve graphics performance. The "Margin" property of text-objects has a new default of 3 rather than 2. For the complete list of changes, check out the official GNU Octave 5.1.0 release notes. GNU Health Federation message and authentication server drops MongoDB and adopts PostgreSQL Bash 5.0 is here with new features and improvements GNU ed 1.15 released!

Yesterday, the team at Crystal released Crystal 0.28.0, a new version of the general-purpose, object-oriented programming language. This release comes with improvements to language, library, networking and much more. What’s new in Crystal 0.28.0 Enums Enums are declared with one line per each member. In the previous versions, users could use spaces or commas, but in this version, users have to use a semicolon. The formatter will now migrate commas to a semicolon. Improved ranges Sometimes users don’t know where to start or finish, from this release users can now understand it better with the help of ranges as they have been categorized as begin-less and end-less ranges. Library lookup The team at Crystal has worked towards simplifying how some libraries and static libraries are looked up and therefore can be overridden in case it is needed. In this release, an env var CRYSTAL_LIBRARY_PATH is used in the process of determining the location of libraries to link to. Numbers now in human readable format In this release, numbers can now be printed in a human-readable form with the help of Number#humanize, Int#humanize_bytes and Number#format. Networking The team has improved HTTP and URI and have made it easy for users to migrate to the new setup. Issues in the URI implementation have been fixed. Collections The team has dropped Iterator#rewind. Users can implement #cycle by storing elements in an array. Bug fixes The issues in the compiler have now been fixed and even the errors in some code constructs have been handled. Issues related to method lookup have been fixed. Type inference has been improved. The team has worked on the error messages, they have been improved. To know more about this news, check out Crystal’s post. Crystal 0.27.0 released Qt Creator 4.9.0 released with language support, QML support, profiling and much more Redox OS 0.50 released with support for Cairo, Pixman, and other libraries and packages    

Soundation, online music production software, released their new music studio built on WebAssembly Threads, after working closely with Google. It is the first music production software to run on WebAssembly Threads, which contributes to considerably improved speed, performance, and stability when producing music in a browser. Its online music studio is used by over 80,000 creatives who produce music directly in their web browsers. For Soundation’s users, the WebAssembly technology provides an improved performance on multicore machines, between 100-300 percent*, according to measurements. Soundation has been collaborating with Google’s WASM and Chrome Audio teams for over a year, working to optimize the implementation of Soundation Studio based on WebAssembly, with support of multithreading and shared memory. Adam Hasslert, CEO, Soundation, said, “Implementing WebAssembly Threads is a key part of our mission to build the next-generation music production service online. This technology will have a significant impact on how web apps are made in the future, and it’s essential for us to lead this development and offer our users the most powerful alternative.” Thomas Nattestad at CDS, Product Manager, WebAssembly, said, “Soundation is one of the first adopters of WebAssembly Threads. They use these Threads to achieve fast, parallelized processing to seamlessly mix songs. Adding just a single Thread doubled their performance, and by the time they added five threads, they more than tripled their performance.” How did Soundation conduct the tests? Soundation made tests of complex Soundation Studio project (consisting of 10 audio tracks, 12 synthesizers, 270 audio regions with audio samples and notes with 84 filter effects applied) to generate the audio file. The test was later run on Ubuntu 16.04, Chrome 72.0.3584.0 (64-bit) on board they had Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ. They then compared systems based on WebAssembly, PNaCL, native application using different processing buffer sizes in ring buffer. WebAssembly version has been tested using different number of threads. Here’s a video by Thomas Nattestad, the Product Manager for WebAsssembly, introducing Soundation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgOGZgAPUjQ&feature=youtu.be&t=474 Cloudflare’s Workers enable containerless cloud computing powered by V8 Isolates and WebAssembly Google Chrome 70 now supports WebAssembly threads to build multi-threaded web applications Mozilla shares plans to bring desktop applications, games to WebAssembly and make deeper inroads for the future web

After announcing TypeScript 3.1 RC version last week, Microsoft released TypeScript 3.1 as a stable version, yesterday. This release comes with support for mapped array and tuple types, easier properties on function declarations, typesVersions for version redirects, and more. Support for mapped array and tuple types TypeScript has a concept called ‘mapped object type’ which can generate new types out of existing ones. Instead of introducing a new concept for mapping over a tuple, mapped object types now just “do the right thing” when iterating over tuples and arrays. This means that if you are using the existing mapped types like Partial or Required from lib.d.ts, they will now also automatically work on tuples and arrays. This change will eliminate the need to write a ton of overrides. Properties on function declarations For any function or const declaration that’s initialized with a function, the type-checker will analyze the containing scope to track any added properties. This enables users to write canonical JavaScript code without resorting to namespace hacks. Additionally, this approach for property declarations allows users to express common patterns like defaultProps and propTypes on React stateless function components (SFCs). Introducing typesVersions for version redirects Users are always excited to use new type system features in their programs or definition files. However, for the library maintainers, this creates a difficult situation where they are forced to choose between supporting new TypeScript features and not breaking its older versions. To solve this, TypeScript 3.1 introduces a new feature called typesVersions. When TypeScript opens a package.json file to figure out which files it needs to read, it will first look for the typesVersions field. The field will tell TypeScript to check which version of TypeScript is running. If the version in use is 3.1 or later, it figures out the path you've imported relative to the package and reads from the package's ts3.1 folder. Refactor from .then() to await With this new refactoring, you can now easily convert functions that return promises constructed with chains of .then() and .catch() calls to async functions that uses await. Breaking changes Vendor-specific declarations removed: TypeScript's built-in .d.ts library and other built-in declaration file libraries are partially generated using Web IDL files provided from the WHATWG DOM specification. While this makes keeping lib.d.ts easier, many vendor-specific types have been removed. Differences in narrowing functions: Using the typeof foo === "function" type guard may provide different results when intersecting with relatively questionable union types composed of {}, Object, or unconstrained generics. How to install this latest version? You can get the latest version through NuGet or via npm by running: npm install -g typescript According to their roadmap, TypeScript 3.2 is scheduled to be released in November with strictly-typed call/bind/apply on function types. To read the full list of updates, check their official announcement on MSDN. TypeScript 3.1 RC released TypeScript 3.0 is finally released with ‘improved errors’, editor productivity and more How to work with classes in Typescript

Clojurists Together shortlisted two projects namely Neanderthal and Aleph for Q1 of 2019 (February-April) to provide funding for further development of these projects, the details of which they shared yesterday. These projects will get total funding of $9,000, which means $3,000 per month. https://twitter.com/cljtogether/status/1109925960155983872 What is Clojurists Together? Clojurists Together was formed back in 2017 and is run by a board of developers in the Clojure Community. It focuses on keeping the development of open source Clojure software sustainable by raising funds and providing support for infrastructure and documentation. Additionally, it also supports other community initiatives like the Google Summer of Code. The way it works is that open source developers apply for funding, and if the board members think that the project meets the requirements of the Clojurists Together members, their project is selected for funding. Then the developers get paid to work on their project for three months. The funds are raised with the help of Clojure companies and individual developers who can sign up for a monthly contribution or do a one-time donation. This is their fifth funding cycle and previously they have supported datascript, kaocha, cljdoc, Shadow CLJS, clj-http, Figwheel, ClojureScript, and CIDER. Details of the projects funded Neanderthal Neanderthal is a Clojure library for faster matrix and linear algebra computations. It is based on native libraries of BLAS and LAPACK computation routines for both CPU and GPU. On GPU, this library is almost 3000x faster than optimized Clojure/Java libraries and on CPU it is 100x faster than optimized pure Java. This project is being developed by Dragan Djuric, who works on the Uncomplicate suite of libraries and is also the professor of Software Engineering at the University of Belgrade. Within the span of these three months, Djuric plans to work on some of the following updates: Writing an introductory series named Deep Learning from the ground up with Clojure. Integrating Nvidia’s cuSolver into Neanderthal's CUDA GPU engine to provide some key LAPACK functions that are only available on the CPU. Along with these developments, he will also be improving the documentation and tutorials for Neanderthal. Aleph Aleph is a Clojure library for client and server network programming. Based on Netty, it is said to be one of the best options for building high-performance communication systems in Clojure. Oleksii Kachaiev, who is working on Aleph, has planned the following additions for Aleph in the allocated 3 months: Releasing a new version of Aleph with the latest developments Updating internals of the library and interactions with Netty to ease the operational burden and improve performance Implementing missing parts of the websocket protocol To know how far these projects have come, check out this monthly update for February shared by Clojurists Together yesterday. To read the official announcement, visit the official site of Clojurists Together. Clojure 1.10 released with Prepl, improved error reporting and Java compatibility ClojureCUDA 0.6.0 now supports CUDA 10 Clojure 1.10.0-beta1 is out!

The R Core Team released R 3.5.3, last week. R 3.5.3 explores bug fixes to the functions writeLines, setClassUnion, and stopifnot. R 3.5.3 is a minor release and does not consist of many new changes or improvements. What’s new in R 3.5.3? Detection of flags has been improved for C++ 98/11/14/17. There’s a new macro ‘F_VISIBILITY’ chosen as an alternative for ‘F77_VISIBILITY’. This new macro will now become the preferred form in R 3.6.0. The issue in writeLines (readLines (fnam), fnam) has been fixed. It now works as expected. setClassUnion () no longer sends warnings to its users. It instead uses message() on encountering “non local” subclasses in class members. The failure issue in stopifnot (exprs = T) has been fixed. R team usually use the release names that are in references to Peanuts strips/films. The code-name for this release ( R 3.5.3) has been selected as "Great Truth" by the R team, which left its users with a bit of a mystery. R core team also gave a hint to its users, saying that the clue is in the date of the release i.e. 11th March 2019. The code-name has been debunked, with one user tweeting out the reference in one of the Peanuts strips: https://twitter.com/AdelmoFilho42/status/1105079537749184512 For more information, check out the official R 3.5.3 release notes. Android Studio 3.5 Canary 7 releases! LXD 3.11 releases with configurable snapshot expiry, progress reporting, and more GNU Octave 5.1.0 releases with new changes and improvements