Tech News - Programming

On Monday, the CEO and Co-founder of Dark, Ellen Chisa, announced the project had raised $3.5 million in funding in a Medium post. Dark is a holistic project that includes a programming language (Darklang), an editor and an infrastructure. The value of this, according to Chisa, is simple: "developers can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have near-instant deployment, which we’re calling deployless." Along with Chisa, Dark is led by CTO, Paul Biggar, who is also the founder of CircleCI, the CI/CD pioneering company. The seed funding is led by Cervin Ventures, in participation with Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, Xfactor, Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West and Yubari. What are the key features of the Dark programming language? One of the most interesting features in Dark is that deployments take a mere 50 milliseconds. Fast. Chisa says that currently the best teams can manage deployments around 5–10 minutes, but many take considerably longer, sometimes hours. But Dark was designed to change this. It's purpose-built, Chisa seems to suggest, for continuous delivery. “In Dark, you’re getting the benefit of your editor knowing how the language works. So you get really great autocomplete, and your infrastructure is set up for you as soon as you’ve written any code because we know exactly what is required.” She says there are three main benefits to Dark’s approach: An automated infrastructure No need to worry about a deployment pipeline ("As soon as you write any piece of backend code in Dark, it is already hosted for you,” she explains.) Tracing capabilities are built into your code. "Because you’re using our infrastructure, you have traces available in your editor as soon as you’ve written any code. There's undoubtedly a clear sense - whatever users think of the end result - that everything has been engineered with an incredibly clear vision. Dark has been deployed on SaaS platform and project tracking tools Chisa highlights how some customers have already shipped entire products on Dark. Chase Olivieri, who built Altitude, a subscription SaaS providing personalized flight deals, using Drark is cited by Chisa, saying that "as a bootstrapper, Dark has allowed me to move fast and build Altitude without having to worry about infrastructure, scaling, or server management." Downside of Dark is programmers have to learn a new language Speaking to TechCrunch, Chisa admitted their was a downside to Dark - you have to learn a new language. "I think the biggest downside of Dark is definitely that you’re learning a new language, and using a different editor when you might be used to something else, but we think you get a lot more benefit out of having the three parts working together." Chisa acknowledged that it will require evangelizing the methodology to programmers, who may be used to employing a particular set of tools to write their programs. But according to her the biggest selling point is that it will remove the complexity around deployment by bringing an integrated level of automation to the process. Is Darklang basically like AWS Lambda? The community on Hacker News compares Dark with AWS Lambda, with many pessimistic about its prospects. In particular they are skeptical about the efficiency gains Chisa describes. "It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws [sic] lambda’s are now," said one user. "You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?” Dark’s Co-founder, Paul Biggar responded to this in the thread. “Dark founder here. Yes, completely agree with this. To a certain extent, Dark is aimed at being what lambda/serverless should have been." He continues by writing: "The thing that frustrates me about Lambda (and really all of AWS) is that we're just dealing with a bit of code and bit of data. Even in 1999 when I had just started coding I could write something that runs every 10 minutes. But now it's super challenging. Why is it so hard to take a request, munge it, send it somewhere, and then respond to it. That should be trivial! (and in Dark, it is)" The team has planned to roll out the product publicly in September. To find out more more about Dark, read the team's blog posts including What is Dark, How Dark is a functional language, and How Dark allows deploys in 50ms. The V programming language is now open source – is it too good to be true? “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?”, US Congressman questions Facebook on Libra security design choices Rust’s original creator, Graydon Hoare on the current state of system programming and safety

The R Core Team has released R 4.0.3 (codename: "Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out"), the latest update to the R statistical computing system. This is a minor update to the R 4.0.x series, and so should not require any changes to existing R 4.0 scripts or packages. It is available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux systems from your local CRAN mirror.  This release includes minor improvements and bug fixes including improved timezone support on MacOS, improved labels on dot charts, better handling of large tables for Fisher's Exact Test and Chi-Square tests, and control over timeouts for internet connections.  For complete details on the R 4.0.3, check out the announcement linked below. R-announce mailing list: R 4.0.3 is released  

Yesterday, the team at Microsoft announced that .NET Core 3.0 Preview 6 is now available. It includes updates for compiling assemblies for improved startup, optimizing applications for size with linker and EventPipe improvements. The team has also released new Docker images for Alpine on ARM64. Additionally they have made updates to ASP.NET Core and Blazor. The preview comes with new Razor and Blazor directive attributes as well as authentication, authorization support for Blazor apps and much more. https://twitter.com/dotnet/status/1138862091987800064 What’s new in the .NET Core 3.0 Preview 6 Docker images The .NET Core Docker images and repos including microsoft/dotnet and microsoft/dotnet-samples are updated. The Docker images are now available for .NET Core as well as ASP.NET Core on ARM64. Event Pipe enhancements With Preview 6, Event Pipe now supports multiple sessions, users can consume events with EventListener in-proc and have out-of-process event pipe clients. Assembly linking .NET core 3.0 SDK offers a tool that can help in reducing the size of apps by analyzing IL linker and cutting down on unused assemblies. Improving the startup time Users can improve the startup time of their .NET Core application by compiling their application assemblies as ReadyToRun (R2R) format. R2R, a form of ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation is supported with .NET Core 3.0. But it can’t be used with earlier versions of .NET Core. Additional functionality The Native Hosting sample posted by the team lately, demonstrates an approach for hosting .NET Core in a native application. The team is now exposing general functionality to .NET Core native hosts as part of .NET Core 3.0.  The functionality is majorly related to assembly loading that makes it easier to produce native hosts. New Razor features In this release, the team has added support for the new Razor features which are as follows: @attribute This release comes with new @attribute directive that adds specified attribute to the generated class. @code This release comes with new @code directive that is used in .razor files for specifying a code block for adding to the generated class as additional members. @key In .razor files, the new @key directive attribute is used for specifying a value that can be used by the Blazor diffing algorithm to preserve elements or components in a list. @namespace The @namespace directive works in pages and views apps and it is also supported with components (.razor). Blazor directive attributes In this Blazor release, the team has added standardized common syntax for directive attributes on Blazor which makes the Razor syntax used by Blazor more consistent and predictable. Event handlers In Blazor, event handlers now use the new directive attribute syntax than the normal HTML syntax. This new syntax is similar to the HTML syntax, but it has @ character which makes C# event handlers distinct from JS event handlers. Authentication and authorization support With this release, Blazor has a built-in support for handling authentication as well as authorization. The server-side Blazor template also supports the options that are used for enabling the standard authentication configurations with ASP.NET Core Identity, Azure AD, and Azure AD B2C. Certificate and Kerberos authentication to ASP.NET Core Preview 6 comes along with a Certificate and Kerberos authentication to ASP.NET Core. Certificate authentication requires users to configure the server for accepting certificates, and then add the authentication middleware in Startup.Configure and the certificate authentication service in Startup.ConfigureServices. Users are happy with this news and they think the updates will be useful. https://twitter.com/gcaughey/status/1138889676192997380 https://twitter.com/dodyg/status/1138897171636531200 https://twitter.com/acemod13/status/1138907195523907584 To know more about this news, check out the official blog post. .NET Core releases May 2019 updates An introduction to TypeScript types for ASP.NET core [Tutorial] What to expect in ASP.NET Core 3.0

Yesterday, the team at GNOME released the latest version of GNOME 3, GNOME 3.32, a free open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. This release comes with improvements to desktop, web and much more. What’s new in GNOME 3.32? Fractional Scaling Fractional scaling is available as an experimental option that includes several fractional values with good visual quality on any given monitor. This feature is a major enhancement for the GNOME desktop. It requires manually adding scale-monitor-framebuffer to the settings keyorg.gnome.mutter.experimental-features. Improved data structures in GNOME desktop This release comes with improvements to foundation data structures in the GNOME Desktop for faster and snappier feel to the animations, icons and top shell panel. The search database has been improved which helps in searching faster. Even the on-screen keyboard has been improved, it now supports an emoji chooser. New automation mode in the GNOME Web GNOME Web now comes with a new automation mode which allows the application to be controlled by WebDriver. The reader mode has been enhanced now that features a set of customizable preferences and an improved style. With this release, the touchpad users can now take advantage of more gestures while browsing. For example, swipe left or right to go back or forward through browsing history. New settings for permissions Settings come with a new “Application Permissions” panel that shows resources and permissions for various applications, including installed Flatpak applications. Users can now grant permissions to certain resources when requested by the application. The Sound settings have been enhanced for supporting a vertical layout and an intuitive placement of options. With this release, the night light color temperature can now be adjusted for a warmer or cooler setting. GNOME Boxes GNOME Boxes tries to enable 3D acceleration for virtual machines if both the guest and host support it. This leads to better performance of graphics-intensive guest applications such as games and video editors. Application Management from multiple sources This release can handle apps available from multiple sources, such as Flatpak and distribution repositories. With this release, Flatpak app entries now can list the permissions required on the details page. This will give users a comprehensive understanding of what data the software will need access to. Even browsing application details will get faster now with the new XML parsing library used in this release. To know more about this release, check out the official announcement. GNOME team adds Fractional Scaling support in the upcoming GNOME 3.32 GNOME 3.32 says goodbye to application menus Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes  

Headlines about the recent NPM layoff has raised questions about the company culture and ethics. NPM which stands for Node Package Manager is now being regarded as “Not Politely Managed”. The San Francisco startup, NPM Inc, the company behind the widely used NPM JavaScript package repository,  laid off 5 employees in a wrong, unprofessional and unethical manner. The incident stands imperative of the fact that many of us while accepting those lucrative job offers merely ask companies not to be unethical, and seldom expect them to actually be good. Indeed, social psychologist, Roy Baumeister convincingly argues there’s an evolutionary reason to focus more on getting people to avoid bad things than to do good things; among other reasons, humans are hardwired to consider potential threats that could harm us. Bob Sutton, author of fantastic and influential books like Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule, draws on Baumeister’s work to highlight why it’s so critical to stamp out poorly behaving leaders (and employees) in organizations. Frédéric Harper, a developer advocate who was among those who lost their jobs, posted at length about the situation on Twitter. His concerns, did not come from being laid off. That happens, he said, and will happen again. "It’s the total lack of respect, empathy and professionalism of the process," he said. In an email to The Register, he said there appeared to be a disconnect between the company's professed values and its behavior. NPM layoff took its roots under the new leadership The layoffs actually started last summer when the company hired a new CEO, Bryan Bogensberger, to take the company from about $3m in annual revenue to 10x-20x, explained an early NPM employee who spoke with The Register on condition of anonymity. Bogensberger was previously the 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 has been running NPM since around July or August 2018, a source explained, but wasn't actually announced as CEO until January 2019 because his paperwork wasn't in order. Bryan brought in his own people, displacing longtime NPM staffers. "As he stacked the management ranks with former colleagues from a previous startup, there were unforced errors," another source explained to the Register. A culture of suspicion and hostility emerged under the new leadership. At NPM an all-hands meeting was held at which employees were encouraged to ask frank questions about the company's new direction. Those who spoke up were summarily fired last week, the individual said, at the recommendation of an HR consultant. https://twitter.com/ThatMightBePaul/status/1112843936136159232 People were very surprised by the layoffs at NPM. "There was no sign it was coming. It wasn't skills based because some of them heard they were doing great." said CJ Silverio, ex-CTO at NPM who was laid off last December. Silverio and Harper both are publicizing the layoff as they had declined to sign the non-disparagement clause in the NPM severance package. The non-disparagement clause prevents disclosure of the company’s wrongdoing publicly. A California law which came into effect in January, SB 1300 prohibits non-disparagement clause in the employment severance package but in general such clauses are legal. One of the employees fired last Friday was a month away from having stock options vest. The individual could have retained those options by signing a non-disparagement clause, but refused. https://twitter.com/neverett/status/1110626264841359360 “We can not comment on confidential personnel matters," CEO Bryan Bogensberger mentioned. "However, since November 1, we have approximately doubled in size to 55 people today, and continue to hire aggressively for many positions that will optimize and expand our ability to support and grow the JavaScript ecosystem over the long term.” Javascript community sees it as a leadership failure The community is full of outrage on this incident, many of them have regarded this as a 100% leadership failure. Others have commented that they would put NPM under the list of “do not apply” for jobs in this company. This news comes to them as a huge disappointment and there are questions asked about the continuity of the npm registry. Some of them also commented on creating a non profit node packages registry. While others have downgraded their paid package subscription to a free subscription. Rebecca Turner, core contributor to the project and one of the direct reportees to Harper has voluntarily put down her papers in solidarity with her direct reports who were let go. https://twitter.com/ReBeccaOrg/status/1113121700281851904 How goodness inspires goodness in organization Compelling research by David Jones and his colleagues finds that job applicants would prefer to work for companies that show real social responsibility–those that improve their communities, the environment, and the world. Employees are most likely to be galvanized by leaders who are actively perceived to be fair, virtuous, and self-sacrificing. Separate research by Ethical Systems founder, Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that such leaders influence employees to feel a sense of “elevation”—a positive emotion that lifts them up as a result of moral excellence. Liz Fong, a developer advocate at Honeycomb tweets on the npm layoff that she will never want to be a manager again if she had to go through this kind of process. https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1112902206381064192 Layoffs becoming more common and frequent in Tech Last week we also had IBM in news for being sued by former employees for violating laws prohibiting age discrimination in the workplace: the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act (OWBPA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Another news last week which came as a shocker was Oracle laying off a huge number of employees as a part of its “organizational restructuring”. The reason behind this layoff round was not clear, while some said that this was done to save money, some others said that people working on a legacy product were let go. While all of these does raise questions about the company culture, it may not be wrong to say that the Internet and social media makes corporate scandals harder than ever to hide. With real social responsibility easier than ever to see and applaud–we hope to see more of “the right things” actually getting done. Update from the NPM statement after 10 days of the incident After receiving public and community backlash on such actions, NPM published a statement on Medium on April 11 that, "we let go of 5 people in a company restructuring. The way that we undertook the process, unfortunately, made the terminations more painful than they needed to be, which we deeply regret, and we are sorry. As part of our mission, it’s important that we treat our employees and our community well. We will continue to refine and review our processes internally, utilizing the feedback we receive to be the best company and community we can be." Does this mean that any company for its selfish motives can remove its employees and later apologize to clean its image? Update on 14th June, Special report from The Register The Register published a special report last Friday saying that JavaScript package registry and NPM Inc is planning to fight union-busting complaints brought to America's labor watchdog by fired staffers, rather than settling the claims. An NLRB filing obtained by The Register alleges several incidents in which those terminated claim executives took action against them in violation of labor laws. On February 27, 2019, the filing states, a senior VP "during a meeting with employees at a work conference in Napa Valley, California, implicitly threatened employees with unspecified reprisals for raising group concerns about their working conditions." The document also describes a March 25, 2019, video conference call in which it was "impliedly [sic] threatened that [NPM Inc] would terminate employees who engaged in union activities," and a message sent over the company's Keybase messaging system that threatened similar reprisals "for discussing employee layoffs." The alleged threats followed a letter presented to this VP in mid-February that outlined employee concerns about "management, increased workload, and employee retention." The Register has heard accounts of negotiations between the tech company and its aggrieved former employees, from individuals apprised of the talks, during which a clearly fuming CEO Bryan Bogensberger called off settlement discussions, a curious gambit – if accurate – given the insubstantial amount of money on the table. NPM Inc has defended its moves as necessary to establish a sustainable business, but in prioritizing profit – arguably at the expense of people – it has alienated a fair number of developers who now imagine a future that doesn't depend as much on NPM's resources. The situation has deteriorated to the point that former staffers say the code for the npm command-line interface (CLI) suffers from neglect, with unfixed bugs piling up and pull requests languishing. The Register understands further staff attrition related to the CLI is expected. To know about this story in detail check out the report published by The Register. The npm engineering team shares why Rust was the best choice for addressing CPU-bound bottlenecks npm Inc. announces npm Enterprise, the first management code registry for organizations npm JavaScript predictions for 2019: React, GraphQL, and TypeScript are three technologies to learn

There have been several discussions around renaming Perl 6. Earlier this month, another such discussion started when Elizabeth Mattijsen, one of the Perl 6 core developers submitted the "Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating issue. She suggested changing its name to Camelia, which is also the name of Perl’s mascot. In the year 2000, the Perl team basically decided to break everything and came up with a whole new set of design principles. Their goal was to remove the “historical warts” from the language including the confusion surrounding sigil usage for containers, the ambiguity between the select functions, and more. Based on these principles Perl was redesigned into Perl 6. For Perl 6, Wall and his team envisioned to make it a better object-oriented as well as a better functional programming language. There are many differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6. For instance, in Perl 5 you need to choose things like concurrency system and processing utilities, but in Perl 6 these features are part of the language itself. In an interview with the I Programmer website, when asked about how the two languages differ, Moritz Lenz, a Perl and Python developer, said, “They are distinct languages from the same family of languages. On the surface, they look quite similar and they are designed using the same principles.” Why developers want to rename Perl 6 Because of the aforementioned differences, many developers find the “Perl 6” name very confusing. This name does not convey the fact that it is a brand new language. Developers may instead think that it is the next version of the Perl language. Some others may believe that it is faster, more stable, or better compared to the earlier Perl language. Also, many search engines will sometimes show results for Perl 5 instead of Perl 6. “Having two programming languages that are sufficiently different to not be source compatible, but only differ in what many perceive to be a version number, is hurting the image of both Perl 5 and Perl 6 in the world. Since the word "Perl" is still perceived as "Perl 5" in the world, it only seems fair that "Perl 6" changes its name,” Mattijsen wrote in the submitted issue. To avoid this confusion Mattijsen suggests an alternative name: Camelia. Many developers agreed with her suggestion. A developer commented on the issue, “The choice of Camelia is simple: search for camelia and language already takes us to Perl 6 pages. We can also keep the logo. And it's 7 characters long, 6-ish. So while ofun and all the others have their merits, I prefer Camelia.” In addition to Camelia, Raku is also a strong contender for the new name for Perl 6, which was suggested by Larry Wall, the creator of Perl. A developer supporting Raku said, “In particular, I think we need to discuss whether "Raku", the alternative name Larry proposed, is a viable possibility. It is substantially shorter than "Camelia" (and hits the 4-character sweet spot), it's slightly more searchable, has pleasant associations of "comfort" or "ease" in its original Japanese, in which language it even looks a little like our butterfly mascot.” Some developers were not much convinced with the idea of renaming the language and think that this rather adds more to the confusion. A developer added, “I don't see how Perl 5 is going to benefit from this. We're freeing the name, yes. They're free to reuse the versions now in however way they like, yes. Are they going to name the successor to 5.30 “Perl 6”? Of course not – that would cause more confusion, make them look stupid and make whatever spiritual successor of Perl 6 we could think of look obsolete. Would they go up to Perl 7 with the next major change? Perhaps, but they can do that anyway: they're another grown-up language that can make its own decisions :) I'm not convinced it would do anything to improve Perl 6's image either. Being Perl 6 is “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Perl is a strong brand. Many people have left it because of the version confusion, yes. But I don't imagine these people coming back to check out some new Camelia language that came out. They might, however, decide to give Perl 6 a shot if they start seeing some news about it – “oh, I was using Perl 15 years ago... is this still a thing? Is that new famous version finally being out and useful? I should check it out!” You can read the submitted issue and discussion on GitHub for more details. What’s new in programming this week Introducing Nushell: A Rust-based shell React.js: why you should learn the front end JavaScript library and how to get started Julia v1.2 releases with support for argument splatting, Unicode 12, new star unary operator, and more

A former Spotify engineer, Mattias Peter Johansson, has outlined how the music streaming platform uses JavaScript on it's desktop application. It's complicated and, according to Reddit, "kind of insane". Responding to a question on Quora, Johansson says it could be "among the top 25 most intricate uses of JavaScript in the world." What's particularly interesting is how this intricate JavaScript has influenced the Spotify architecture and the way the development teams are organized. How JavaScript is used on the Spotify desktop app JavaScript is used across the Spotify desktop client. Wherever UI is concerned, it uses JavaScript. C++ is used for functionality beneath the UI, with JavaScript sitting on top of it. The languages are connected by an interface aptly called a 'bridge.' Spotify's squads and spotlets The Spotify team is made up of small squads of anywhere from 3 to 12 people. Johansson explains that  "a feature is generally owned by a single squad, and during normal conditions the squad has all it needs to develop and maintain its feature." Each team has as many backend, front end, and mobile developers as necessary for the particular feature it owns. These features are known as 'spotlets.' Each of these spotlets are essentially web apps that come together to power the desktop app's UI. Johansson explains how they work, saying: They all run inside Chromium Embedded Framework, each app living within their own little iframe, which gives squads the ability to work with whatever frameworks they need, without the need to coordinate tooling and dependencies with other squads. The advantage of this is that it makes technical decision making much easier. As Johansson explains, "introducing a library is a discussion between a few people instead of decision that involves ~100 people and their various needs." Shared functionalities across the Spotify development team Although spotlets and squads create a somewhat fragmented picture of a development team, things are unified. "The latest versions of all Spotlets are zipped and bundled with the desktop client binary on every release, assets and all," says Johansson. Individual spotlets are also sometimes released where an emergency fix might be needed. Although tooling decisions are left up to individual squads, there are a couple of tools that are used across the team. This includes GLUE, a CSS framework that allows some coordination and alignment in terms of design. The team also rely heavily on npm, as you might expect. "We have our own internal npm repository where we publish internal modules, and we package the code together using a Browserify-like tool."

Yesterday, on the first day of Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft introduced WSL 2, the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux. With WSL 2, file system performance will increase and users will be able to run more Linux apps. The initial builds of WSL 2 will be available by the end of June, this year. https://twitter.com/windowsdev/status/1125484494616649728 https://twitter.com/poppastring/status/1125489352795201539 What’s new in WSL 2? Run Linux libraries WSL 2 powers Windows Subsystem for Linux to run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows. This new architecture brings changes to how these Linux binaries interact with Windows and computer’s hardware, but it will still manage to provide the same user experience as in WSL Linux distros With this release, the individual Linux distros can be run either as a WSL 1 distro, or as a WSL 2 distro, and can be upgraded or downgraded at any time. Also, users can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side. This new architecture uses an entirely new architecture that uses a real Linux kernel. Increases speed With this release, file-intensive operations like git clone, npm install, apt update, apt upgrade, and more will get faster. The initial tests that the team has run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster as compared to WSL 1, when unpacking a zipped tarball. And it is around 2-5x faster while using git clone, npm install and cmake on various projects. Linux kernel with Windows The team will be shipping an open source real Linux kernel with Windows which will make full system call compatibility possible. This will also be the first time a Linux kernel is shipped with Windows. The team is building the kernel in house and in the initial builds they will ship version 4.19 of the kernel. This kernel is been designed in tune with WSL 2 and it has been optimized for size and performance. The team will service this Linux kernel through Windows updates, users will get the latest security fixes and kernel improvements without needing to manage it themselves. The configuration for this kernel will be available on GitHub once WSL 2 will release. The WSL kernel source will consist of links to a set of patches in addition to the long-term stable source. Full system call compatibility The Linux binaries use system calls for performing functions such as accessing files, requesting memory, creating processes, and more. In WSL 1 the team has created a translation layer that interprets most of these system calls and allow them to work on the Windows NT kernel. It is challenging to implement all of these system calls, where some of the apps don’t run properly in WSL 1. WSL 2 includes its own Linux kernel which has full system call compatibility. To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Microsoft introduces Remote Development extensions to make remote development easier on VS Code Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 Microsoft and GitHub employees come together to stand with the 996.ICU repository      

Yesterday, at the Node+JS Interactive in Montreal, the OpenJS Foundation announced the acceptance of Electron into the Foundation’s incubation program. The OpenJS Foundation provides vendor-neutral support for sustained growth within the open source JavaScript community. It's supported by 30 corporate and end-user members, including GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, and Microsoft. Electron is an open source framework created for building desktop apps using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, it is based on Node.js and Chromium. Additionally, Electron is widely used on many well-known applications including Discord, Microsoft Teams, OpenFin, Skype, Slack, Trello, Visual Studio Code, etc. “We’re heading into 2020 excited and honored by the trust the Electron project leaders have shown through this significant contribution to the new OpenJS Foundation,” said Robin Ginn, Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation. He further added, “Electron is a powerful development tool used by some of the most well-known companies and applications. On behalf of the community, I look forward to working with Electron and seeing the amazing contributions they will make.” Electron’s cross-platform capabilities make it possible to build and run apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Initially developed by GitHub in 2013, today the framework is maintained by a number of developers and organizations. Electron is suited for anyone who wants to ship visually consistent, cross-platform applications, fast and efficiently. “We’re excited about Electron’s move to the OpenJS Foundation and we see this as the next step in our evolution as an open source project,” said Jacob Groundwater, Manager at ElectronJS and Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft. “With the Foundation, we’ll continue on our mission to play a prominent role in the adoption of web technologies by desktop applications and provide a path for JavaScript to be a sustainable platform for desktop applications. This will enable the adoption and development of JavaScript in an environment that has traditionally been served by proprietary or platform-specific technologies.” What this means for developers Electron joining the OpenJS Foundation does not change how Electron is made, released, or used — and does not directly affect developers building applications with Electron. Even though Electron was originally created at GitHub, it is currently maintained by a number of organizations and individuals. In 2019, Electron codified its governance structure and invested heavily into formalizing how decisions affecting the entire project are made. The Electron team believes that having multiple organizations and developers investing in and collaborating on Electron makes the project stronger. Hence, lifting Electron up from being owned by a single corporate entity and moving it into a neutral foundation focused on supporting the web and JavaScript ecosystem is a natural next step as they mature in the open-source ecosystem. To know more about this news, check out the official announcement from the OpenJS Foundation website. The OpenJS Foundation accepts NVM as its first new incubating project since the Node.js Foundation and JSF merger Node.js and JS Foundations are now merged into the OpenJS Foundation Denys Vuika on building secure and performant Electron apps, and more

Deno is a runtime by creator of Node, Ryan Dahl. It aims at fixing some of the problems in Node. Originally written in Go, Deno is now rewritten in Rust and is in version 0.1. Node.js was developed nearly a decade ago. It was designed in 2009 to use server-side JavaScript. The implementation solved problems of 2009, for which Dahl has no regrets. But lately, he did have regrets elaborated in a talk on 10 things he regrets about Node in the JSConf 2018. Some of the regrets included packages, security issues, the entire build system, among others. Deno is a secure TypeScript run-time on Chrome V8. It was originally written in Go and now has been rewritten in Rust to avoid potential garbage collector issues. Deno is similar to Node.js but is focused on security. Deno takes full advantage of JavaScript being a secure sandbox. So, unlike Node.js, Deno is sandboxed. Scripts should run without any write access by default. Using untrusted utilities like linters will be optional. There is no package.json in Deno, no npm and it is not explicitly compatible with Node. An important thing to note is that the requirement is Python 2, not Python 3. This is because Chrome V8 scripts still use Python 2. There were plans to rewrite Deno in Rust when it was originally released in June this year. Dahl mentioned in a GitHub comment: “The reason for not using Go is that it has a rather complex runtime - including a GC. Although I haven't experienced any problems with that yet, it's not hard to imagine that down the road that might clash badly with V8's very complex runtime.” You can get the binaries here to get started and check out the Github repo. Deploying Node.js apps on Google App Engine is now easy Creating Macros in Rust [Tutorial] Rust Language Server, RLS 1.0 releases with code intelligence, syntax highlighting and more

NVIDIA announced the release of CUDA 10.2 last week. This is the last version to have macOS support for developing CUDA applications and will be completely dropped in the next release. Other updates include libcu++, new interoperability APIs, and more. Key updates in CUDA 10.2 General CUDA 10.2 updates New APIs: CUDA 10.2 ships with CUDA Virtual Memory Management APIs. New interoperability APIs are added for buffer allocation, synchronization, and streaming. However, these are in beta and may change in future releases. Support for new operating systems: This release adds support for a few new operating systems including Fedora 29, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.x and 8.x, OpenSUSE 15.x, SUSE SLES 12.4 and SLES 15.x, Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. In CUDA 10.2, RHEL 6.x is deprecated and support will be dropped in the next release of CUDA. Increased texture size limit for Maxwell+ GPUs: The 1D linear texture size limit for Maxwell+ GPUs in CUDA is now increased to 2^28. Updates in CUDA tools The Nvidia CUDA Compiler (NVCC) now has support for Clang 8.0 and Xcode 10.2 as host compilers. There is a new -forward-unknown-to-host-compiler option that allows forwarding options not recognized by NVCC to the host compiler. Visual Profiler and NVProf now allow tracing features for non-root and non-admin users on desktop platforms. The events and metrics profiling is still restricted to non-root and non-admin users. Also, starting with CUDA 10.2, Visual Profiler and NVProf use dynamic/shared CUPTI library. Users are required to set the path to the CUPTI library before launching Visual Profiler and NVProf. Updates in CUDA libraries cuBLAS: The cuBLAS library is a fast GPU-accelerated implementation of the standard basic linear algebra subroutines (BLAS). In CUDA 10.2, performance is further improved on some large and other GEMM sizes due to increased internal workspace size. cuSOLVER: This library includes a collection of direct solvers that deliver significant acceleration for computer vision, CFD, and linear optimization apps. In this release, a new Tensor Cores Accelerated Iterative Refinement Solver (TCAIRS) is introduced. The cusolverMg library includes ‘cusolverMgGetrf’ and ‘cusolverMgGetrs’ to support multi-GPU LU. cuFFT: This library provides GPU-accelerated FFT implementations that perform up to 10x faster than CPU-only alternatives. This release comes with improved performance and scalability for these use cases: multi-GPU non-power of 2 transforms, R2C and Z2D odd-sized transforms, 2D transforms with small sizes and large batch counts These were a few updates in CUDA 10.2. Read the official release notes to know what else has shipped with this release. CUDA 10.1 released with new tools, libraries, improved performance and more Implementing color and shape-based object detection and tracking with OpenCV and CUDA [Tutorial] NVIDIA releases Kaolin, a PyTorch library to accelerate research in 3D computer vision and AI

On Tuesday, Atila Neves the Deputy leader for D programming language posted about his vision for D and what he would like to do with D lang in the near future. Make D programming language default for web dev and mobile applications D’s static reflection and code generation capabilities make it an ideal candidate to implement a codebase that needs to be called from several different languages and environments (e.g. Python, Java, R). Traditionally this is done by specifying data structures and RPC calls in an Interface Definition Language (IDL) then translating that to the supported languages, with a wire protocol to go along with it. With D, none of that is necessary. One can write the production code in D and have libraries automatically making the code callable from other languages. Hence it will be easy to write D code that runs as fast or faster than the alternatives, and it will be a win on all fronts. Memory Safety for D lang Atila believes that D is a systems programming language with value types and pointers, it isn’t memory safe. He says that DIP1000 is in the right direction, but it still needs to be memory safe unless programmers opt-out via @trusted block or function. The DIP1000 proposal includes a scope mechanism that will know when the lifetime of a reference is over by providing a mechanism to guarantee that a reference cannot escape lexical scope. Thus it can safely implement memory management schemes rather than tracing the garbage collection. Safe and easy concurrency in D programming language As per Atila safe and easy concurrency in D is mostly achieved through actor models, but they still need to finalize shards and make everything @safe as well. Centralizing all reflection needs with an API Atila says instead of disparate ways of getting things done with fragmented APIs like (__traits, std.traits, custom code), he would like there to be a library that centralizes all reflection needs with a great API. Easy interoperability for C++ developers C++ has been successful so far in making the transition from C virtually seamless. Atila wants current C++ programmers with legacy codebases to just as easily be able to start writing D code. Faster development times D needs a fast interpreter so that developers can skip machine code generation and linking. This should be the default way of running unittest blocks for faster feedback, with programmers only compiling their code for runtime performance and/or to ship binaries to final users. String interpolation in D programming language Code generation is one of D’s greatest strengths, and token strings enable visually pleasing blocks of code that are actually “just strings”. Hence, String interpolation would make it vastly easier to use. To know more about D programming language, check out the official post by Atila Neves. “Rust is the future of systems programming, C is the new Assembly”: Intel principal engineer, Josh Triplett The V programming language is now open source – is it too good to be true? Rust’s original creator, Graydon Hoare on the current state of system programming and safety

On August 23, Jonathan Turner, an Azure SDK developer introduced a new shell written in Rust, called Nushell or ‘Nu’. This Rust-based shell is inspired by the “classic Unix philosophy of pipelines, the structured data approach of PowerShell, functional programming, systems programming, and more,” Turner writes in his official blog. The idea of Nushell struck when Turner’s friend Yehuda Yatz demonstrated the working of Powershell. Yatz asked Turner if he could join in his project “we could take the ideas of a structured shell and make it more functional (as opposed to object-oriented)? What if, like PowerShell, it worked on Windows, Linux, and macOS? What if it had great error messages?” Turner highlights the fact that “everything in Nu is data”; this means when a user tries other commands and realize that they are using the same commands to filter, to sort, etc. Rather than having the need to remember all the parameters to all the commands, they can just use the same verbs to act over our data, regardless of where the data came from. Nu also understands structured text files like JSON, TOML, YAML, and allows users to manipulate their data, and much more. “You get used to using the verbs, and then you can use them on anything. When you’re ready, you can write it back to disk,” Turner writes. Nu also supports opening and looking at the text and binary data. On opening a source file, users can scroll around in a syntax-highlighted file. Further on opening an xml, they can look at its data. They can even open a binary file and look at what’s inside. Turner mentions that there is a lot one might want to explore with Nushell. Hence, the team has released Nu with the ability to extend it with plugins. Nu will look for these plugins in your path, and load them up on startup. Rust language is the major backbone for this project and Nushell would not have been possible without Rust, Turner exclaims. Nu internally uses async/await, async streams, and employs liberal use of “serde” to manage serializing and deserializing into the common data format and to communicate with plugins. Nushell GitHub page reads, “This project has reached a minimum-viable product level of quality. While contributors dogfood it as their daily driver, it may be instable for some commands. Future releases will work fill out missing features and improve stability. Its design is also subject to change as it matures.” The team will further work towards stability, the ability to use Nu as the main shell, the ability to write functions and scripts in Nu, and much more. Users can also read the book on Nu, available in both English and Spanish language. To know more about this news in detail, head over to Jonathan Turner’s official blog post or visit Nushell’s GitHub page. Announcing ‘async-std’ beta release, an async port of Rust’s standard library Rust 1.37.0 releases with support for profile-guided optimization, built-in cargo vendor, and more Weaponizing PowerShell with Metasploit and how to defend against PowerShell attacks [Tutorial]

Apple announced Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 yesterday. The latest Swift 5 update in Xcode 10.2 explores new features and changes to App thinning, Swift Language, Swift Standard Library, Swift Package Manager, and Swift Compiler. Swift is a popular general-purpose, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and beyond. Writing Swift code is interactive and its syntax is concise yet expressive. Swift code is safe and comprises all modern features. What’s new in Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2? In Xcode 10.2, the Swift command-line tools now require the Swift libraries in macOS. These libraries are included by default in Swift, starting with macOS Mojave 10.14.4. App Thinning Swift apps now no longer include dynamically linked libraries for the Swift standard library as well as the Swift SDK overlays in build variants for devices that run iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, and tvOS 12.2. This results in Swift apps getting smaller once they’re shipped in the App Store or thinned in an app archive for development distribution. Swift Language String literals in Swift 5 can be expressed with the help of enhanced delimiters. A string literal consisting of one or more number signs (#) before the opening quote considers backslashes and double-quote characters as literal. Also, Key paths can now support the identity keypath (\.self) i.e. a WritableKeyPath that refers to its entire input value. Swift Standard Library The standard library in Swift now consists of the Result enumeration with Result.success(_:) and Result.failure(_:) cases. Due to the addition of Standard Library, the Error protocol now conforms to itself and makes working with errors easier. The SIMD types and basic operators have now been defined in the standard library. Set and Dictionary also make use of a different hash seed now for each newly created instance. The DictionaryLiteral type has been renamed as KeyValuePairs in Swift 5. The String structure’s native encoding has been switched from UTF-16 to UTF-8. This improves the relative performance of String.UTF8View as compared to String.UTF16View. Swift Package Manager Targets can now declare the commonly used, target-specific build settings while using the Swift 5 Package.swift tools-version. A new dependency mirroring feature in Swift 5 enables the top-level packages to override dependency URLs. Package manager operations have become significantly faster for larger packages. Swift Compiler Size taken up by Swift metadata can be reduced now as the Convenience initializers defined in Swift only allocates an object ahead of time in case its calling a designated initializer defined in Objective-C. C types consisting of alignment greater than 16 bytes are no longer available in Swift. Swift 3 mode has been deprecated. Supported values for the -swift-version flag has become 4, 4.2, and 5.Default arguments can now be printed in SourceKit-generated interfaces for Swift modules. For more information, check out the official Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 release notes. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta is here with stable ABI Exclusivity enforcement is now complete in Swift 5 ABI stability may finally come in Swift 5.0

Today, the CentOS community released the much-awaited CentOS 8 (1905). RHEL 8 was released in May this year at the Red Hat Summit 2019. Users were highly anticipating this CentOS 8 rebuild. In CentOS 8, the community has partnered more closely with Fedora and will be sharing git repos with the Fedora system. Highlights of CentOS 8 As the CentOS Linux distribution is a platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it conforms fully with Red Hat's redistribution policy and aims to have full functional compatibility with the upstream product. Version control system and Database servers It will provide version control systems such as Git 2.18, Mercurial 4.8, and Subversion 1.10. Database servers such as MariaDB 10.3, MySQL 8.0, PostgreSQL 10, PostgreSQL 9.6, and Redis 5 have been included. GNOME Shell GNOME Shell has been rebased to version 3.28. The GNOME session and the GNOME Display Manager use Wayland as their default display server. The X.Org server, which is the default display server in RHEL 7, is available as well. Cryptography policies System-wide cryptographic policies, which configures the core cryptographic subsystems, covering the TLS, IPsec, SSH, DNSSEC, and Kerberos protocols, are applied by default. Python updates As Python 3.6 is the default Python implementation in RHEL 8, CentOS may get similar Python default updates. Also, limited support for Python 2.7 may be provided. No version of Python is installed by default. To know about all the highlights in detail, read the upstream Release Notes Deprecated functionalities Assuming the deprecations in RHEL 8, similar CentOS 8 features have been deprecated. The --interactive option of the ignoredisk Kickstart command has been deprecated. NFSv3 over UDP has been disabled. Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and Network scripts have been deprecated. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are deprecated To know more about the deprecated functionalities read the upstream documentation. Removed security functionality The Clevis HTTP pin has been removed shadow-utils no longer allow all-numeric user and group names securetty is now disabled by default To know more about the other removed security functionalities, read the upstream documentation. Known issues in CentOS 8 If the user is planning to install CentOS-8 in a VirtualBox guest, you should not select "Server with a GUI" (default) during the installation. Support for some adapters have been removed CentOS-8. ELRepo offers driver update disks (DUD) for some of those that are still commonly used. For the list of the device IDs provided by the ELRepo packages, please see here. Once CentOS-8 is installed, you can use the centosplus kernel (kernel-plus) which has support for those devices. While using the boot.iso and NFS to install, the automatic procedure for adding the AppStream-Repo will fail. You have to disable it and add the right NFS-path manually. To install and use CentOS 8 (1905), a minimum of 2 GB RAM is required. The community members recommend at least 4 GB RAM for it to function smoothly. To know more about CentOS 8 in detail, read CentOS wiki page. Other news in Tech .NET Core 3.0 is now available with C# 8, F# 4.7, ASP.NET Core 3.0 and general availability of EF Core 3.0 and EF 6.3 Introducing Weld, a runtime written in Rust and LLVM for cross-library optimizations Nim 1.0 releases with improved library, backward compatibility and more