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Python 3.7.1 and 3.6.7 are maintenance releases for Python 3.7 and Python 3.6 respectively. They contain a variety of fixes. New features in Python 3.7 Python 3.7 was released in June and is the next branch after Python 3.6. Some of the new features in Python 3.7 are: Postponed evaluation of annotations By postponing the evaluation of annotations in Python, two bugs were fixed: Annotations were restricted to using names which were already available in the current scope. That is, they did not support forward references. Annotating source code had negative effects on starting a Python program. Legacy C locale coercion Determining a sensible default strategy for handling the 7-bit ASCII text encoding is a problem in Python 3. It is implied by the use of the default C or POSIX locale on non-Windows platforms. With PEP 538, the default interpreter command line interface is updated to automatically coerce that locale to an available UTF-8 based locale. Automatically setting LC_CTYPE using this method means that both the core interpreter and locale-aware C extensions will assume the use of UTF-8 as the default text encoding. Forced UTF-8 runtime mode The new -X utf8 command line option and PYTHONUTF8 environment variable can now be used to enable the CPython UTF-8 mode. While in UTF-8 mode, CPython ignores the locale settings to use the UTF-8 encoding by default. Built-in breakpoint() The new built-in breakpoint() function is included as an easy and consistent way to enter the Python debugger. The built-in breakpoint() function calls sys.breakpointhook(). A new C API for thread-local storage Anew Thread Specific Storage (TSS) API is added to CPython which annuls use of the existing TLS API within the CPython interpreter. It deprecates the existing API. Customization of access to module attributes Python 3.7 allows defining __getattr__() on modules. It will be called whenever a module attribute is not found otherwise. Also, defining __dir__() on modules is now allowed. New time functions with nanosecond resolution The range of clocks in modern systems can exceed the precision of a floating point number returned by the time.time() function. For having greater precision, six new nanosecond variants are added. Show DeprecationWarning in __main__ The default handling of DeprecationWarning has been changed in Python 3.7. These warnings are again shown by default. It happens only when the code triggering them is running directly in the __main__ module. Core support for typing module and generic types Earlier, any changes to the core CPython interpreter were not made by PEP 484. Since type hints and the typing module are extensively used by developers, this restriction is now removed. Hash-based .pyc Files The pyc format is extended to allow the hash of the source file to be used for invalidation instead. This was previously used for the source timestamp. Such .pyc files are considered “hash-based”. Hash-based .pyc files come can be of the types checked and unchecked. New documentation translations Three new translations namely Japanese, French and Korean are added. Some fixes in Python 3.7.1 Fix for a possible null pointer dereference in bytesobject.c. Fix a bug where iteration order of OrderedDict was not copied. A Fix for async generators not being finalized. This used to happen even when the event loop was in debug mode and garbage collector runs in another thread. Fix self-cancellation in a C implementation of asyncio.Task. Fix for a reference issue inside multiprocessing.Pool that caused the pool to remain alive on being deleted without being closed or terminated explicitly. Ensure that PyObject_Print() returns -1 on error every time. Also, Python 3.6.7 is released as the seventh maintenance release for Python 3.6. Visit the Python documentation for a complete list of bug fixes in Python 3.7.1 visit the Python documentation and know more about features in Python 3.7 in the documentation. Meet Pypeline, a simple python library for building concurrent data pipelines Python comes third in TIOBE popularity index for the first time Home Assistant: an open source Python home automation hub to rule all things smart

Yesterday, Oracle announced the general availability of Java SE 13 (JDK 13) and that its binaries are expected to be available for download today. In addition to improved performance, stability, and security, this release comes with two preview features, switch expressions and text blocks. This announcement coincides with the commencement of Oracle’s co-located OpenWorld and Code One conferences happening from September 16-17 2019 at San Francisco. Oracle’s director of Java SE Product Management, Sharat Chander, wrote in the announcement, “Oracle offers Java 13 for enterprises and developers. JDK 13 will receive a minimum of two updates, per the Oracle CPU schedule, before being followed by Oracle JDK 14, which is due out in March 2020, with early access builds already available.” This release is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 with the Classpath Exception (GPLv2+CPE). For those who are using Oracle JDK release as part of an Oracle product or service, it is available under a commercial license. Read also: Oracle releases open-source and commercial licenses for Java 11 and later What’s new in JDK 13 JDK 13 includes the implementation of the following Java Enhancement Proposals (JEPs): Dynamic class-data sharing archives (JEP 350) JEP 350 improves the usability of application class-data sharing to allow the dynamic archiving of classes once the execution of a Java application is completed. The archived classes will consist of all loaded application classes and library classes that are not present in the default, base-layer CDS archive. Uncommit unused memory (JEP 351) Previously, the z garbage collector did not uncommit and returned memory to the operating system, even if it was left unused for a long time. With JEP 351 implemented in JDK 13, the z garbage collector will return unused heap memory to the operating system. Read also: Getting started with Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) in Java 11 [Tutorial] Reimplement the Legacy Socket API (JEP 353) In JDK 13, the underlying implementation used by the ‘java.net.Socket’ and ‘java.net.ServerSocket APIs’ is replaced by “a simpler and more modern implementation that is easy to maintain and debug,” as per JEP 353. This new implementation aims to make adapting to user-mode threads or fibers, that is currently being explored in Project Loom, much easier. Switch expressions preview (JEP 354) The switch expressions feature proposed in JEP 354 allows using ‘switch’ as both a statement or an expression. Developers will now be able to use both the traditional ‘case ... : labels’ (with fall through) or new ‘case ... -> labels’ (with no fall through). This preview feature in JDK 13 aims to simplify everyday coding and prepare the way for the use of pattern matching (JEP 305) in a switch. Text blocks preview (JEP 355) The text blocks preview feature proposed in JEP 355 makes it easy to express strings that take up several source code lines. This preview feature aims to improve both “the readability and the writeability of a broad class of Java programs to have a linguistic mechanism for denoting strings more literally than a string literal.” Check out the official announcement by Oracle to know what else has landed in JDK 13. Other news in programming Microsoft introduces Static TypeScript, as an alternative to embedded interpreters, for programming MCU-based devices Golang 1.13 module mirror, index, and Checksum database are now production-ready Why Perl 6 is considering a name change?

Yesterday, the team at Redox released Redox OS 0.5.0, a Unix like operating system written in Rust. The team has added important programs and libraries to this release. What’s new in Redox OS 0.50? Cairo This release comes with Cairo, a 2D graphics library that supports multiple output devices. It produces consistent output on all output media and takes advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It is implemented as a library which is written in the C programming language, while the bindings are available for various programming languages. relibc Redox OS 0.50 features relibc, a portable POSIX C standard library which is written in Rust and supports Redox and Linux. It reduces the issues with newlib and further creates a safer alternative to a C standard library. It has been designed to be used under redox, as an alternative to newlib. Event system The event system has been redesigned for providing support for select and poll. This release comes with new packages added to the Cookbook as well as for memory mapping support implemented in it. Standard images This release comes with new images based on new bootloaders for coreboot and EFI. The team has worked towards providing libraries for EFI Rust development and for developing coreboot payloads in Rust. LLVM This release also features the LLVM Project which is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies. The LLVM Core libraries come with a target-independent optimizer and a code generation support for popular CPUs.          GLib This version of Redox OS comes with GLib which is the low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK+ and GNOME.                   Pixman Redox OS 0.50 comes with Pixman that is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation that features image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Orbital widget toolkit This release comes with Orbital Widget Toolkit which is a multi-platform GUI toolkit for building user interfaces with Rust. This toolkit is based on the entity component system pattern which provides a functional-reactive API. It provides fast performance and ease over cross-platform development. Few users are happy and excited about this release and are appreciating the Redox team. A user commented on HackerNews, “Congrats on getting another release out the door! I was beginning to fear that momentum was stalling in lieu of PopOS. Keep up the great work!” The developer of Redox OS shared that there are still security concerns in the kernel with regards to memory management. He commented, “There are a couple known security issues in the kernel regarding memory management. One is that memory is granted in pages, so buffers passed to a scheme are over-mapped for the process handling it. You have to be root to handle a scheme, so it was not a high severity issue.” He further added that there are concerns with the grants which can be dropped by owning process and highlighted that more kernel work is needed. He commented, “Another is that grants can be dropped by the owning process while in use by another process. This can lead to the re-allocation of said grants in the owning process, making memory accessible to the other users of the grant. More kernel work is needed to prevent schemes from leaking data in this manner.” To know more about this news in detail, check out Redox’s official announcement. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support LLVM 8.0.0 releases! JUnit 5.4 released with an aggregate artifact for reducing your Maven and Gradle files  

Yesterday, the Eclipse Foundation announced the release of the Jakarta EE 8 full platform, web profile specifications, and related Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs). This marks the completion of Java EE’s transition to an open and vendor-neutral evolution process. Explaining the vision behind this release, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation said, “There are tens of thousands of companies with strategic investments in Java EE and over 10 million Java developers globally. The finalization of the Jakarta EE 8 specifications means that the transition of Java EE to our new open, vendor-neutral, and community-based process has been completed, and paves the way for an entirely new era in Java innovation for enterprise and cloud workloads.” Back in 1999, Sun Microsystems developed Java EE under the name Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which was rebranded as Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) in 2006. When in 2010 Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Java EE’s governance and oversight also moved to Oracle. The development of Java EE’s technical specifications was managed under the Java Community Process (JCP), which was tightly vendor-led effort. In order to make Java EE more open, Oracle made the Eclipse Foundation the new steward of enterprise Java. Read also: Eclipse foundation releases updates on its Jakarta EE Rights to Java trademarks Updates in Jakarta EE 8 Jakarta EE 8 has shipped with the same set of technical specifications as Java EE 8, which means developers are not required to make any changes to their Java EE 8 applications or their use of existing APIs. In this release, the team has focused on updating the process used to determine new specs for Jakarta EE that will replace JCP. This new process is called the Jakarta EE Specification Process (JESP), which will be used by the Jakarta EE Working Group for further development of Jakarta EE. It is based on the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) with a few changes. Rhuan Rocha, a Java EE developer, wrote in the announcement, “The goals of JESP is being a process as lightweight as possible, with a design closer to open source development and with code-first development in mind. With this, this process promotes a new culture that focuses on experimentation to evolve these specification based on experiences gained with experimentation.” A key change in this process is that there is no Spec Lead now who had special intellectual property rights under the JCP. In an interview with JAXenter, Milinkovich explained how this process differs from JCP, “The Jakarta EE Specification Process is a level playing field in which all parties are equal, and collaboration is a must. Some of the other significant differences include a code-first approach, rather than a focus on specifications as the starting point. You can also expect a more fully open, collaborative approach to generating specifications, with every decision made collectively by the community.” Along with the release of Jakarta EE 8 specifications, the Eclipse Foundation also announced the certification of Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 as an open-source compatible implementation of the Jakarta EE 8 Platform. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by the Eclipse Foundation. Other news in programming Is Scala 3.0 a new language altogether? Martin Odersky, its designer, says “yes and no” Core Python team confirms sunsetting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 Go 1.13 releases with error wrapping, TLS 1.3 enabled by default, improved number literals, and more

Yesterday, the Rust team announced the release of Rust 1.34. This release introduces alternative cargo registries, includes support for ‘?’ operator in documentation tests, stabilized TryFrom and TryInto, and more. Support for alternative cargo registries Rust provides a public crate registry called crates.io where developers can publish crates with the cargo publish command. However, as this crate registry is not for people maintaining proprietary code, they are forced to use git or path dependencies. This release brings support for alternate cargo registries, which coexists with crates.io. So, users will now be able to write software that depends on crates from both crates.io and their custom registry. Support for the ‘?’ operator in documentation tests It was proposed in RFC 1937 to add support for the ‘?’ operator in the main() function, #[test] functions, and doctests allowing them to return Option or Result with error values.  This ensured a non-zero exit code in the case of the main() function and a test failure in the case of the tests. Support for the main() and #[test] functions were already implemented in previous versions. However, in the case of documentation tests, support for ‘?’ was limited to doctests that have an explicit main() function. In this release, the team has implemented full support for ‘?’ operator in doctests. Stabilized TryFrom and TryInto The TryFrom and TryInto traits that were proposed in an RFC back in 2016 are finally stabilized in this release to allow fallible type conversions. A ‘Infallible’ type is added for conversions that cannot fail such as u8 to u32. In future versions, the team plans to convert Infallible to an alias for the (!) never type. Library stabilizations This release comes with an expanded set of stable atomic integer types with signed and unsigned variants from 8 to 64 bits available. In the previous versions, non-zero unsigned integer types, for example, NonZeroU8 were stabilized. With this release, signed versions are also stabilized. The ‘iter::from_fn’ and ‘iter::successors’ functions are also stabilized. To know more about the updates in Rust 1.34, check out its official announcement. Chris Dickinson on how to implement Git in Rust The npm engineering team shares why Rust was the best choice for addressing CPU-bound bottlenecks Rust 1.33.0 released with improvements to Const fn, pinning, and more!  

Yesterday, reports from The Register confirmed that the Javascript Package registry NMP Inc. and the 3 former employees who were fired, agreed on a settlement.  NPM which stands for Node Package Manager, is the company behind the widely used NPM JavaScript package repository. In March, the company laid off 5 employees in a unprofessional and unethical manner. In April, 3 out of 5 former staffers – Graham Carlson, Audrey Eschright, and Frédéric Harper – had formally accused NPM Inc of union busting in a complaint to the US National Labor Relations Board. https://twitter.com/bram_parsons/status/1146230097617178625 The deal was settled after the third round of negotiations between the two parties as per The Register. The filing posted on the NLRB website, administrative law judge Gerald Etchingham said he had received a letter from one of the attorneys involved in the dispute that both sides had agreed to settle. The terms of the deal were not disclosed but as per the NLRB settlements, such cases usually involve a pay back, job restoration or additional compensation. However, it is highly unlikely that none of the former employees will agree for job restore and will not return to npm. Other than this, NPM Inc is also required to share a letter with current employees accepting the ways in which it violated the laws. But there are no reports of this action yet from Npm inc. https://twitter.com/techworkersco/status/1146255087968239616 Audrey Eschright, one of the plaintiffs  complained on Twitter about the company's behaviour and former rejections to settle on claims. "I'm amazed that NPM has rejected their latest opportunity to settle the NLRB charges and wants to take it to court," she wrote. "Doing so continues the retaliation I and my fellow claimants experienced. We're giving up our own time, making rushed travel plans, and putting in a lot of effort because we believe our rights as workers are that important." According to Eschright, NPM Inc refused to settle because the CEO has taken the legal challenge personally. "Twice their lawyers have spent hours to negotiate an agreement with the NLRB, only to withdraw their offer," she elaborated on Twitter. "The only reason we've heard has been about Bryan Bogensberger's hurt feelings." The Register also mentioned that last week NPM Inc had tried to push back a hearing to be held on 8th July citing the reason that management was traveling for extensive fund raising. But NLRB denied the request and said that the reason is not justified.  NLRB also mentioned that NPM Inc "ignores the seriousness of these cases, which involve three nip-in-the-bud terminations at the onset of an organizing drive." It is indeed true that NPM Inc ignores the seriousness of this case but also oversees the fact that npm registry coordinates the distribution of hundreds of thousands of modules used by some 11 million JavaScript developers around the world. The management of NPM Inc is making irrational decisions and behaving notoriously, due to which the code for the npm command-line interface (CLI) suffers from neglect, unfixed bugs piling up and pull requests languishing.  https://twitter.com/npmstatus/status/1146055266057646080 On Monday, there were reports of Npm 6.9.1 bug which was caused due to .git folder present in the published tarball. The Community architect at the time, Kat Marchán had to release npm 6.9.2 to fix the issue. Shortly after, Marchán, who was a CLI and Community Architect at npm has also quit the company. Marchán made this announcement yesterday on Twitter, adding that she is no longer a maintainer on npm CLI or its components.  https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/1146208849206005760 Another ex-npm employee noted on Marchán’s resignation, that every modern web framework depends on npm, and npm is inseparable from Kat’s passionate brilliance. https://twitter.com/cowperthwait/status/1146209348135161856 NPM Inc. now not only needs to fix bugs but majorly it also needs to fix its relationship and reputation among the Javascript community. Update on 20th September - NPM Inc. CEO resigns Reports from news sources came about NPM CEO, Bryan Bogensberger to resign effective immediately in order to pursue new opportunities. NPM's Board of directors have commenced a search for a new CEO. The company's leadership will be managed collaboratively by a team comprised of senior npm executives. "I am proud of the complete transformation we have been able to make in such a short period of time," said Bogensberger. "I wish this completely revamped, passionate team monumental success in the years to come!" Before joining npm, Inc., Bogensberger spent three years as CEO and co-founder of Inktank, a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage systems that was acquired by Red Hat, Inc. for $175 million in 2014. He also has served as vice president of business strategy at DreamHost, vice president of marketing at Joyent, and CEO and co-founder of Reasonablysmart, which Joyent acquired in 2009. To know more, check out PR Newswire website. Is the Npm 6.9.1 bug a symptom of the organization’s cultural problems? Surprise NPM layoffs raise questions about the company culture  

At the ongoing CES 2019, IBM has unveiled what possibly is the world’s first standalone quantum computer. Dubbed, the IBM Q System One, it is a giant 50-qubit quantum computer that gives repeatable and predictable high-quality qubits. This is IBM’s first step forward in the commercialization of quantum computing as IBM Q System One steps out of the research lab for the first time. https://youtu.be/LAA0-vjTaNY IBM Q System One is comprised of a number of custom components. This includes a stable and auto-calibrated Quantum hardware. It has Cryogenic engineering for maintaining a cold and isolated quantum environment. The Quantum firmware manages system health and upgrades without downtime for users. Classical computation provides secure cloud access and hybrid execution of quantum algorithms. IBM is calling the Q System One as the future beyond supercomputing, capable of handling applications such as modeling financial data and organizing super-efficient logistics. “This new system is critical in expanding quantum computing beyond the walls of the research lab as we work to develop practical quantum applications for business and science,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice-president of hybrid cloud and director of IBM Research. In the second half of 2019, IBM is planning to open the IBM Q Quantum Computation Center to expand IBM’s commercial quantum computing program. This new center will be accessible to members of the IBM Q Network. You may go through IBM’s Q-Experience FAQs and Beginner's guide to working with System Q for a much substantive understanding. The US to invest over $1B in quantum computing, President Trump signs a law UK researchers build the world’s first quantum compass to overthrow GPS Italian researchers conduct an experiment to prove that quantum communication is possible on a global scale

Last week, Atlassian software company released their updated ‘Atlassian Software License Agreement’ and their ‘Cloud Terms of Service’, which would be effective from the 1st of November, 2018. Just as any general agreement, this one too mentions the scope, the users authorized, use of software, and so on. However, it has set up certain restrictions based on the performance of its software. As per the new agreement, benchmarking of Atlassian software is forbidden. Restrictions on benchmarking As per the discussion on the Atlassian Developer Community, Andy Broker highlighted two clauses from the restriction section have been highlighted, which includes: (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Software Andy Broker, a marketplace vendor explains this clause as, “This sounds very much like the nonsense clause that Intel were derided for, regarding the performance of their CPU’s. Intel backtracked after being lambasted by the world, I can’t really understand how these points got into new Atlassian terms, surely the terms have had a technical review? Just… why, given all the DC testing being done ongoing, this is an area where data we gathered may be interesting to prospective customers.” (j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing. Andy Broker further adds, “So, we can’t guide/help a customer understand how to even measure performance to determine if they have a performance issue in the “Software”, e.g. generating a performance baseline before an ‘app’ is involved? The result of this would appear sub-optimal for Customer and Vendors alike, the “Software” performance just becomes 3rd party App performance that we cannot ‘explain’ or ‘show’ to customers.” Why Atlassian decided to forbid benchmarking? As per a discussion thread on Hacker News, many users have stated their views on why Atlassian planned to forbid benchmarking on its software. According to a comment, “If the company bans benchmarking, then the product is slow.” A user also stated that Atlassian software is slow, has annoying UX, and it is very inconsistent. This may be because most of its software is built using JIRA which has a Java backend and is not Node based. Jira cannot be rebuilt from scratch only slowly abstracted and broken up into smaller pieces. Also, around 3 years ago Atlassian forked behind the firewall for two distinct products, multi-tenant cloud and traditional to get into the cloud sector with a view to attracting more potential customers, thus increasing growth. A user also stated, “Cloud was full buy into AWS, taking a behind the firewall product and making it multi-tenanted cloud-based is a huge job. A monolith service now becomes highly distributed so latency's obviously mounted up due to the many services to service interactions.” The user further added, “some things which are heavily multi-threaded and built in statically compiled languages had to be built in single threaded Node.js because everyone is using Node.js and your language is now banned. It's not surprising there are noticeable performance differences.” Another user has suggested, “the better way for a company to handle this concern is to proactively run and release benchmarks including commentary on the results, together with everything necessary for anyone to reproduce their results.” The user added that they can even fund a trustworthy neutral third party to perform benchmarking with proper disclosure of the funding. To read the entire discussion in detail, head over to Hacker News. Atlassian acquires OpsGenie, launches Jira Ops to make incident response more powerful Atlassian sells Hipchat IP to Slack Atlassian open sources Escalator, a Kubernetes autoscaler project

After a long wait, the stable version of Rails 6 is finally available for users. Five days ago, David Hansonn, the Ruby on Rails creator, released the final version, which has many new major features such as Action Mailbox, Action Text, Parallel Testing, and Action Cable Testing. Rails 6 also has many minor changes, fixes, and upgrades in Railties, Action Pack, Action View, and more. This version also requires Ruby 2.5.0+ for running codes. Hansonn says, “While we took a little while longer with the final version than expected, the time was spent vetting that Rails 6 is solid.” He also informs that GitHub, Shopify, and Basecamp and other companies and applications have already been using the pre-release version of Rails 6 in their production. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1162426045405921282 Read More: The first release candidate of Rails 6.0.0 is now out! Major new features in Rails 6 Action Mailbox This new framework can direct incoming emails to controller like mailboxes, such that user can use it for processing in Rails. Action Mailbox ships with access to Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. It is also possible to control inbound mails via the built-in Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses. These inbound emails are transformed to InboundEmail records using Active Record. They can also be routed asynchronously using Active Job to one or several dedicated mailboxes. To know more about the basics of Action Mailbox, head over to action mailbox basics. Action Text Action Text includes the Trix editor that can handle formatting, links, quotes, lists, embedded images, and galleries. It also provides rich text content which is saved in the RichText model associated with the existing Active Record model in the chosen application. To get an overview on Action Mailbox, read the action text overview page. Parallel Testing Parallel Testing allows users to parallelize their test suite, thus reducing the time required to run the entire test suite. The forking process is the default method used to do parallel testing. To learn how to do parallel testing with processes, check out the parallel testing page. Action Cable Testing Action Cable testing tools allows users to test their Action Cable functionality at the connections, channels and broadcast levels. For information on connection test case and channel test case, head over to the testing action cable. Other changes in Rails 6 Railties Railties handles the bootstrapping process in a Rails application and also provides the Rails generators core. Multiple database support for rails db:migrate:status command has been added. A new guard has been introduced to protect against DNS rebinding attacks. Action Pack The Action Pack framework is used for handling and responding to web requests. It also provides mechanisms for routing, controllers, and more. Rails 6 allows the use of #rescue_from for handling parameter parsing errors. A new middleware ActionDispatch::HostAuthorization has been added to guard against DNS rebinding attacks. Developers are excited to use the new features introduced in Rails 6, especially the parallel testing feature. A user on Hacker News comments, “Wow, Multiple DB and Parallel Testing is super productive. I hope framework maintainers of other language community should also get inspired by these features.” Another comment reads, “The multiple database support is really exciting. Anything that makes it easier to push database reads to replicas is huge.” Another user says, “Congrats to the Rails team ! I can't praise Rails enough. Such a huge boost in productivity for prototyping or full production app. I use it for both work or side project. I can't imagine a world without it. Long live Rails!” Twitteratis are also praising the Rails 6 release. https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/1162566272271339521 https://twitter.com/AviShastry/status/1162755780229107713 https://twitter.com/excid3/status/1162426797046284288 To know about the minor changes, fixes, and upgrades in Rails 6, check out the Ruby on Rails 6.0 Release Notes. Head over to the Ruby blog for more details about the release. GitLab considers moving to a single Rails codebase by combining the two existing repositories Rails 6 will be shipping source maps by default in production Ruby on Rails 6.0 Beta 1 brings new frameworks, multiple DBs, and parallel testing

RacketCon 2019 happened last month from July 13 to 14 bringing together the Racket community to discuss ideas and future plans for the Racket programming language. Matthew Flatt, one of the core developers, graced the stage to give his talk: State of Racket. In his talk, he spoke about the growing community, performance improvements, and much more. He also touched upon his recommendation to change the surface syntax of Racket2, which has sparked a lot of discussion in the Racket community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnz6y5U0tFs&t=390 Later in July, Greg Hendershott, who has contributed Racket projects like Rackjure and Travis-Racket and has driven a lot of community participation, expressed his concern about this change in a blog post. “I’m concerned the change won’t help grow the community; instead hurt it,“ he added. He further shared that he will shift his focus towards working on other programming languages, which implies that he is stepping down as a Racket contributor. Matthew Flatt recommends surface syntax change for removing technical barriers to entry There is no official proposal about this change yet, but Flatt has discussed it a couple of times. According to Flatt’s recommendation, Racket 2’s ‘lispy’ s-expressions should be changed to something which is not a barrier of entry to new users. He suggests to get rid or reduce the use of parentheses and bring infix operators, which means the operator sign will be written in between the operands, for instance, a + b.  “More significantly, parentheses are certainly an obstacle for some potential users of Racket. Given the fact of that obstacle, it's my opinion that we should try to remove or reduce the obstacle,“ Flatt writes in a mailing list. Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is also an ecosystem for language-oriented programming. Flatt further explained his rationale behind suggesting this change that the current syntax is not only a hindrance to potential users of Racket as a programming language but also to those who want to use it as “a programming-language programming language”. He adds, “The idea of language-oriented programming (LOP) doesn't apply only to languages with parentheses, and we need to demonstrate that.” With this change, he hopes to make Racket2 more familiar and easier-to-accept for users outside the Racket community. Some Racket developers believe changing s-expressions based syntax is not “desirable” Many developers in the Racket community share a similar sentiment as Greg Hendershott. A user on Hacker News added, “Getting rid of s expressions without it being part of a more cohesive improvement (like better supporting a new type system or something) just for mainstream appeal seems like an odd choice to me.” Another user added, “A syntax without s-expressions is not an innovative feature. For me, it's not even desirable, not at all. When I'm using non-Lispy languages like Rust, Ada, Nim, and currently a lot of Go, that's despite their annoying syntactic idiosyncrasies. All of those quirky little curly braces and special symbols to save a few keystrokes. I'd much prefer if all of these languages used s-expressions. That syntax is so simple that it makes you focus on the semantics.” While others are more neutral about this suggested change. “To me, Flatt's proposal for Racket2 smells more like adding tools to better facilitate infix languages than deprecating S-expressions. Given Racket's pedagogical mission, it looks more like a move toward migrating the HtDP series of languages (Beginning Student, Intermediate Student, Intermediate Student with Lambda, and Advanced Student) to infix syntax than anything else. Not really the end of the world or a big change to the larger Racket community. Just another extension of an ecosystem that remains s-expression based despite Algol and Datalog shipping in the box,” a user expressed his opinion. To know more about this change, check out the discussion on Racket’s mailing list. Also, you can share your solutions on Racket2 RFCs. Racket 7.3 releases with improved Racket-on-Chez, refactored IO system, and more Racket 7.2, a descendant of Scheme and Lisp, is now out! Racket v7.0 is out with overhauled internals, updates to DrRacket, TypedRacket among others

British researchers have successfully built the world’s first standalone quantum compass, which will act as a replacement for GPS as it allows highly accurate navigation without the need for satellites. This quantum compass was built by researchers from Imperial College London and Glasgow-based laser firm M Squared. The project received funding from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) under the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme. The device is completely self-contained and transportable and measures how an object's velocity changes over time, by using the starting point of an object and measuring how an object's velocity changes. Thereby, it overcomes issues of traditional GPS systems, such as blockages from tall buildings or signal jamming. High precision and accuracy are achieved by measuring properties of super-cool atoms, which means any loss in accuracy is "immeasurably small". Dr. Joseph Cotter, from the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial, said: “When the atoms are ultra-cold we have to use quantum mechanics to describe how they move, and this allows us to make what we call an atom interferometer. As the atoms fall, their wave properties are affected by the acceleration of the vehicle. Using an ‘optical ruler’, the accelerometer is able to measure these minute changes very accurately.” The first real-world application for the device could be seen in the shipping industry, The size currently is suitable for large ships or aircraft. However, researchers are already working on a miniature version that could eventually fit in a smartphone. The team is also working on using the principle behind the quantum compass for research in dark energy and gravitational waves. Dr. Graeme Malcolm, founder, and CEO of M Squared said: “This commercially viable quantum device, the accelerometer, will put the UK at the heart of the coming quantum age. The collaborative efforts to realize the potential of quantum navigation illustrate Britain’s unique strength in bringing together industry and academia – building on advancements at the frontier of science, out of the laboratory to create real-world applications for the betterment of society.” Read the press release on the Imperial College blog. Quantum computing – Trick or treat? D-Wave launches Leap, a free and real-time Quantum Cloud Service Did quantum computing just take a quantum leap? A two-qubit chip by UK researchers makes controlled quantum entanglements possible

Last month, the npm engineering team in a white paper shared why they chose Rust to rewrite their authorization service. If you are not already aware, npm is the largest package manager that offers both an open source and enterprise registry. The npm registry boasts of about 1.3 billion package downloads per day. Looking at the huge user base, it is not a surprise that the npm engineering team has to regularly keep a check on any area that causes performance problems. Though most of the network-bound operations were pretty efficient, while looking at the authorization service, the team saw a CPU-bound task that was causing a performance bottleneck. They decided to rewrite its “legacy JavaScript implementation” in Rust to make it modern and performant. Why the npm team chose Rust? C, C++, and Java were rejected by the team as C++ or C requires expertise in memory management and Java requires the deployment of JVM and associated libraries. They were then left with two options as the alternate programming languages: Go and Rust. To narrow down on one programming language that was best suited for their authorization service, the team rewrote the service in Node.js, Go, and Rust. The Node.js rewrite was acting as a baseline to evaluate Go or Rust. While rewriting in Node.js took just an hour, given the team’s expertise in JavaScript, the performance was very similar to the legacy implementation. The team finished the Go rewrite in two days but ruled it out because it did not provide a good dependency management solution. “The prospect of installing dependencies globally and sharing versions across any Go project (the standard in Go at the time they performed this evaluation) was unappealing,” says the white paper. Though the Rust rewrite took the team about a week, they were very impressed by the dependency management Rust offers. The team noted that Rust’s strategy is very much inspired by npm’s strategy. For instance, its Cargo command-line tool is similar to the npm command-line tool. All in all, the team chose Rust because not only it matched their JavaScript-inspired expectations, it also gave better developer experience. The deployment process of the new service was also pretty straightforward, and even after deployment, the team rarely encountered any operational issues. The team also states that one of the main reasons for choosing Rust was its helpful community. “When the engineers encountered problems, the Rust community was helpful and friendly in answering questions. This enabled the team to reimplement the service and deploy the Rust version to production.” What were the downsides of choosing Rust? The team did find the language a little bit difficult to grasp at first. The team shared in the white paper, “The design of the language front-loads decisions about memory usage to ensure memory safety in a different way than other common programming languages.” Rewriting the service in Rust came with an extra burden of maintaining two separate solutions for monitoring, logging, and alerting for the existing JavaScript stack and the new Rust stack. Given that it is quite a new language, Rust currently also lacks industry-standard libraries and best practices for these solutions. Read the white paper shared by npm for more details. Mozilla engineer shares the implications of rewriting browser internals in Rust Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey Mozilla partners with Scroll to understand consumer attitudes for an ad-free experience on the web

In the annual Go user survey, the three top requests made by users for Go version 2 were better package management, error handling and the inclusion of generics. Following these requests, the Go 2 draft designs were shared yesterday to include error handling, error values, and adding generics. Note that these are not official proposals. The features, error handling and generics are in step 2 according to the Go release cycle, shown as follows. Source: Go Blog Yesterday, Google developer Russ Cox, gave a talk on design drafts for Golang 2. Go 2 draft designs were also previewed at Gophercon 2018. In his talk, he mentions that the current boilerplate contains too much code for error checks and that the error reporting is not precise enough. For example, an error while using os.Open in which the name of the file which cannot be opened, isn’t mentioned. As proper error reporting only adds to the code, most programmers don’t really bother with this despite knowing that such a practice may create confusion. The new idea, therefore, aims to add a check expression to shorten the checks while keeping them explicit. Cox also stresses on adding experience reports. These reports are difficult but necessary to implement new features. Experience reports turn abstract problems into concrete ones and are needed for changes to be implemented in Golang. They serve as a test case for evaluating a proposed solution and its effects on real-life use-cases. Regarding the inclusion of Generics, Cox mentions: “I've been examining generics recently, but I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve. As a result, I can't answer a design question like whether to support generic methods, which is to say methods that are parameterized separately from the receiver. If we had a large set of real-world use cases, we could begin to answer a question like this by examining the significant ones.” Go 2 is not going to be a single release, but a sequence of releases adding features as and when they are ready. The approach is to first make features backward compatible to Go 1. Minor changes could be seen in Go 1 in a year or so. If there are no backward incompatible changes, Go 1.20 may be just declared as Go 2. The conversation for Go 2 has started, and there is a call for community help and contribution to converting the drafts into official proposals. Visit the Go page and the GitHub repository for more details. Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates GoMobile: GoLang’s Foray into the Mobile World

Earlier this month, iqlusion, an infrastructure provider for next-generation cryptocurrency technologies, announced the release of Abscissa 0.1, a security-oriented microframework for building Rust applications. Yesterday, the team announced the release of Abscissa 0.2. Tony Arcieri, the co-founder of iqlusion, wrote in a blog post, “After releasing v0.1, we’ve spent the past few weeks further polishing it up in tandem with this blog post, and just released a follow-up v0.2.” After developing a lot of Rust applications ranging from CLI to network services and managing a lot of the same copy/paste boilerplate, iqlusion decided to create the Abscissa framework. It aims to maximize functionality while minimizing the number of dependencies. What features does Abscissa come with? Command-line option parsing Abscissa comes with simple declarative option parser, which is based on the gumdrop crate. The option parser encompasses several improvements to provide better UX and tighter integration with the other parts of the framework, for example, overriding configuration settings using command-line options. Uses component architecture It uses a component architecture for extensibility, with a minimalist implementation and still is able to offer features like calculating dependency ordering and providing hooks into the application lifecycle. Configuration Allows simple parsing of Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (TOML) configurations to serde-parsed configuration types that can be dynamically updated at runtime. Error handling Abscissa has a generic ‘Error’ type based on the ‘failure’ crate and a unified error-handling subsystem. Logging It uses the ‘log’ crate to provide application-level logging. Secrets management The optional ‘secrets’ module contains a ‘Secret’ type that derives serde’s Deserialize, which can be used for representing secret values parsed from configuration files or elsewhere. Terminal interactions It supports colored terminal output and is useful for Cargo-like status messages with easy-to-use macros. Read the official announcement for more details on Abscissa. You can also check out its GitHub repository. Introducing Ballista, a distributed compute platform based on Kubernetes and Rust Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen on Lucet and the future of WebAssembly and Rust [Interview] Rust 1.36.0 releases with a stabilized ‘Future’ trait, NLL for Rust 2015, and more

Perlin Networks, a scalable DAG-based distributed ledger protocol, introduced a new cross-platform WebAssembly VM named Life. This WebAssembly VM is secure, fast, written in Go and is built specifically for decentralized applications. WebAssembly is a high-level instruction set which enables developers to easily design computationally heavy programs that can securely run on web browsers at an improved speed. Apart from designing programs for the browsers, this instruction set can also be used to train ML models, host databases, or even host blogs/online retail stores 24/7. This is the reason why Perlin networks used it in their project, Life. Projects can easily run WebAssembly code anywhere by simply integrating the Life tool into their applications. Features of Life Life is Fast It uses a wide range of optimization techniques and is faster than all other WebAssembly implementations tested (go-interpreter/wagon, paritytech/wasmi). Life is Correct It implements WebAssembly execution semantics and passes most of the official test suite. Life is Secure User code executed is fully sandboxed. A WebAssembly module's access to resources (instruction cycles, memory usage) may easily be controlled to the very finest detail. Life is Pure This VM does not rely on any native dependencies, and may easily be cross-compiled for running WebAssembly modules on practically any platform such as Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and so on. Life is Practical One can make full use of the minimal nature of WebAssembly to write code once and run anywhere. With Life, one can completely customize how WebAssembly module imports are resolved and integrated. A complete control over the execution lifecycle of the WebAssembly modules is also possible. To know more about the WebAssembly based Life VM, visit its GitHub page. Grain: A new functional programming language that compiles to Webassembly WebAssembly comes to Qt. Now you can deploy your next Qt app in browser