Tech News - Programming

Today, the team at ActiveState, a software-based company known for building Perl, Python and Tcl runtime environments introduced the ActiveState Platform Command Line Interface (CLI), the State Tool. This new CLI tool aims at automating manual tasks such as the setup of development and test systems. With this tool, all instructions in the Readme can easily be reduced to a single command. How can the State Tool benefit the developers? Eases ad-hoc tasks The State Tool can address tasks that cause trouble to developers at project setup or environment setups that don’t work the first time. It also helps developers in managing dependencies, system libraries and other such tasks that affect productivity. These tasks usually end up consuming developers’ coding time. The State Tool can be used to automate all of the ad hoc tasks that developers come across on a daily basis.  Deployment of runtime environment With this tool, developers can now deploy a consistent runtime environment into a virtual environment on their machine and across CI/CD systems with a single command. Sharing secrets and cross-platform scripts Developers can now centrally create secrets that can be securely shared among team members without the need of using a password manager, email, or Slack. They can create and share cross-platform scripts that include secrets for starting off the builds and run tests as well as simplifying and speeding up common development tasks. Developers can incorporate their secrets in the scripts by simply referencing their names. Automation of workflows All the workflows that developers handle can now get centrally automated with this tool. Jeff Rouse, vice president, product management, said in a statement, “Developers are a hardy bunch. They suffer through a thousand annoyances at project startup/restart time, but soldier on anyway. It’s just the way things have always been done. With the State Tool, it doesn’t have to stay that way. The State Tool addresses all the hidden costs in a project that sap developer productivity. This includes automating environment setup to secrets sharing, and even automating the day to day scripts that everyone counts on to get their jobs done. Developers can finally stop solving the same annoying problems over and over again, and just rely on the State Tool so they can spend more time coding.”   To know more about this news, check out the official page.  Podcasting with Linux Command Line Tools and Audacity GitHub’s ‘Hub’ command-line tool makes using git easier Command-Line Tools  

Salesforce has welcomed spring with their new Salesforce Spring 2018 release. With this release, Salesforce users, admins, and developers can try out some fresh features and tools to enhance, tweak, and guide the processes that govern our Salesforce instances. This release brings in exciting enhancements to the Lightning Platform and advanced developments in artificial intelligence. Without further ado, let’s have a quick look at some of the noteworthy features that are really going to change the way you work with Salesforce. Create personalized navigation in Lightning Experience This new Lightning Experience feature in Salesforce allows one to reorder items, rename, or remove the added items. The navigation bar now contains more than just object-level items. One can add granular items, like a dashboard, list, or record, and so on. Build Interactive Salesforce Surveys Creating beautiful, easy-to-use forms for collecting feedback and data from users or customers is now easy. All survey data is stored in your org which is nothing but an entity that contains users, data, and automation corresponding to an individual organization. This unified data storage is helpful especially in creating reports, dashboards and sharing insights within your organization. Customize your Org to match your brand using themes The ability to customise the look and feel of Salesforce has never really been available. With Spring ’18, create up to 300 custom themes or clone the built-in themes provided by Salesforce with just a few clicks. Easy calculation of Opportunity Scoring using Einstein One can prioritize their way to more business with Einstein Opportunity Scoring. Einstein Opportunity Scoring generates opportunity scores based on the record details, history and related activities of the opportunity and related account. Information about the opportunity owner, such as yearly win rates, is also used to calculate the score. Stay on Top of Duplicate Records by Using Duplicate Jobs Duplicates are a pain for most organisations. With the relatively recent release of duplicate and matching rules in Salesforce, creating duplicate jobs with standard or custom matching rules to scan Salesforce business or person accounts, contacts or leads for duplicates has become easy. Job results can be shared with others and information about the duplicate jobs are logged. These logs helps you in tracking your progress in reducing the number of duplicate records in Salesforce org. Easy storage of Data Privacy Preferences Data privacy records, based on the Individual object, lets one store certain data privacy preferences for their customers. These records can help honor and respect customers’ wishes when they request only specific forms of contact from one’s company. Some laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), can require you to honor your customers’ wishes. See More Relevant Objects First in Top Results Top Results list the most relevant results for most frequently used objects. The improved ordering of objects means less scrolling and clicking around to reach the object one wants. To know more about these and other releases in detail, visit the Salesforce Blog. Read More Implementing Automation Process with Salesforce CRM Build a custom Admin Home page in Salesforce CRM Lightning Experience Getting Started with Salesforce Lightning Experience

Day 2 of the Kotlin Conference 2018 just ended yesterday and announcements were made regarding the programming language. There is one more day of the conference which will be streamed live at the Kotlin website. We will look at some of the announcements made in the conference so far. Kotlin 1.3 is now RC Kotlin 1.3 RC is here and brings a lot of new features. Some of them are the following. Contracts The Kotlin compiler now does extensive static analysis to show warnings and reduce boilerplate. ‘Contracts’ in Kotlin 1.3 allow functions to explicitly describe its own behavior in a way which is understood by the compiler. Coroutines Kotlin Coroutines are no longer experimental and will be supported like other features starting from Kotlin version 1.3. Coroutines delegate most of the functionality to libraries and helps in providing a fluid experience that is scalable when needed. Multiplatform projects The multiplatform projects model has been reworked to improve expressiveness and flexibility. It is in line with the language’s goal to function on all platforms. Currently Kotlin supports JVM, Android, JavaScript, iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac and embedded systems like STM32. This is beneficial for reusing code. Kotlin/Native is now in beta Kotlin/Native is designed to enable compilation in platforms where virtual machines do not work. An example would be embedded devices or iOS. Kotlin/Native is a solution to situations when developers need to produce a self-contained program where an additional runtime or virtual machine is not required. After several years of development, Kotlin/Native is now beta. The Kotlin foundation The Kotlin Foundation is a nonprofit nonstock corporation created in 2018. It has backing from JetBrains and Google. The Kotlin Foundation aims to protect, promote and advance the development of Kotlin. New revamped playground The online environment for trying and learning Kotlin has a new look, functionality, and a new section called Learn Kotline by Example. All this is available directly in your web browser via the Kotlin Playground website. The first day can be watched on YouTube. You can watch the Kotlin Conference live at their website. Kotlin 1.3 RC1 is here with compiler and IDE improvements How to implement immutability functions in Kotlin [Tutorial] Forget C and Java. Learn Kotlin: the next universal programming language

New programming languages keep popping up every now and then, but here’s something that’s out of the box - jukebox to be precise! If you’ve ever dressed up (or at least thought of it) in leather tights, a leather jacket, with an axe strung around your neck, belting out your favourite numbers, you’re probably going to love this! Somebody...no not Nickelback, created a language that is designed for creating computer programs using song lyrics! The language is called...hold your breath...Rockstar! Say, what?? Are you kidding me? Is this some kind of joke/’fake news’? No, it’s not. It’s as real as Kurt writing those songs she sang in Hole! ;) Rockstar is heavily influenced by the lyrical conventions of 1980’s hard rock and power ballads. And the somebody who created it is Dylan Beattie, a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio and Development Technologies. Unsurprisingly, Dylan’s a musician himself. Rockstar is already growing in popularity! Will you take a look at the growth on Github and the discussions going on on Reddit? You ask why would Dylan do such a thing? Cos, as Van Halen would say, “Everybody Wants Some”! Well, he thought it would be cool to have such a language, where you can use your favourite lyrics to drive your computer and HR recruiters nuts! It’s mainly part of a movement to force recruiters from using the term, “Rockstar Programmers”. Did I say movement? Rockstar supports a unique feature known as poetic literals, which allow programmers to simultaneously initialize a variable and express their innermost angst. I’m sure Billie Joe Armstrong and Axl Rose will surely appreciate this! This is what sample Rockstar code looks like, solving the fizzbuzz problem: Let’s start with the minimalistic version: Modulus takes Number and Divisor While Number is as high as Divisor Put Number minus Divisor into Number (blank line ending While block) Give back Number (blank line ending function declaration) Limit is 100 Counter is 0 Fizz is 3 Buzz is 5 Until Counter is Limit Build Counter up If Modulus taking Counter, Fizz is 0 and Modulus taking Counter, Buzz is 0 Say "FizzBuzz!" Continue (blank line ending 'If' Block) If Modulus taking Counter and Fizz is 0 Say "Fizz!" Continue (blank line ending 'If' Block) If Modulus taking Counter and Buzz is 0 Say "Buzz!" Continue (blank line ending 'If' Block) Say Counter (EOL ending Until block) And now, the same thing in idiomatic Rockstar code: Midnight takes your heart and your soul While your heart is as high as your soul Put your heart without your soul into your heart Give back your heart Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller My world is nothing Fire is ice Hate is water Until my world is Desire, Build my world up If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Shout "FizzBuzz!" Take it to the top If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing Shout "Fizz!" Take it to the top If Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing Say "Buzz!" Take it to the top Whisper my world Oh yeah, did I mention that Rockstar doesn’t care two hoots about indentation. Also, it discourages the use of comments. Why? Cos this is Rock ‘n’ Roll, baby! Let whoever wants to know the meaning, discover it on their own! Now that’s hardcore! To declare a variable in Rockstar, you simply use a common word like "a, an, the, my or your" as a preface and any unique name (e.g. "Suzanne"). For types, you can use words like "mysterious", meaning no value is assigned, or "nothing/ nowhere/nobody", for null. You could name your variable “em” so to increment it, you’d use "build em up" and to decrement it, you’d use "knock em down". Now if that’s not cool, you tell me what is! Like in Ruby or Python, variables are dynamically typed and you don't need to declare them before use. That’s not all! For I/O, you’re at the liberty of using words like "listen to" or "shout," "whisper" or "scream". Someone actually happened to test out the error handling capabilities of Rockstar, a couple of days ago: If you accidentally typed “!love” as a property, it will return “you give !love a bad name”. I wonder what it would do, if we just typed in the lyrics to Sweet Child o’ Mine. Nevertheless, the Github (Shooting) Stars are growing like a weed (pun intended) ;) I suggest you Don’t Stop Believin’ in it and go check this language out! And don’t forget to tell us in the comments, about how it Rock(ed) You Like a Hurricane or better yet, Shook Me You All Night Long! ;) Will Rust Replace C++? Why Guido van Rossum quit as the Python chief (BDFL) Apollo 11 source code: A small step for a woman, and a huge leap for ‘software engineering’

Last week, AdaCore announced that they are now a member of the RISC-V Foundation. The Risc-V Foundation is a non-profit organization, which provides the free and open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) called RISC-V. RISC-V was created by the Computer Science Division, EECS Department at the University of California in Berkeley with their foundation is supported by over 200 members. The ISA in RISC-V can be implemented via either open-source or proprietary architectures. This allows chip designers to use an assembly language that is designed with clarity. By becoming a part of the RISC-V Foundation, AdaCore’s Ada and SPARK languages are made available to RISC-V developers. This offers them an environment where they can develop applications where safety and security are critical. The first few product offerings from AdaCore—GNAT Pro Ada and GNAT Pro C—are made for bare metal RISC-V 32- and 64-bit architectures. They can also be used for the GNAT Community edition for bare metal RISC-V 32-bit configurations. Rick O’Connor, executive director of the RISC-V Foundation said: “We’re happy to see Ada joining the front row of the languages available to the RISC-V ecosystem. This will create an extremely appealing option for RISC-V users with the most stringent reliability requirements.” Quentin Ochem, the lead of Business Development at AdaCore said: “As we’re seeing the growth of Ada in new projects and markets, RISC-V has rapidly emerged as an indispensable ecosystem to be part of. We are fascinated by the opportunities it creates both at the technical and business levels, and we look forward to becoming an active member of the community.” To know more about AdaCore, visit the AdaCore website. Western Digital RISC-V SweRV Core is now on GitHub A libre GPU effort based on RISC-V, Rust, LLVM and Vulkan by the developer of an earth-friendly computer LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN

GitHub introduced ‘Hub’ that extends git command-line with extra functionality to enable developers complete their everyday GitHub tasks right from the terminal. Hub does not have any dependencies, but as it is designed to wrap git, it is recommended to have at least git 1.7.3 or newer.  Hub provides both new and some extended version of commands that already exist in git. Here are some of them: hub-am: Used to replicate commits locally from a GitHub pull request.  hub-cherry-pick: Allows cherry-picking a commit from a fork on GitHub. hub-alias: Used to show shell instructions for wrapping git.  hub-browse: Used to open a GitHub repository in a web browser. hub-create: Used to create a new repository on GitHub and add a git remote for it. hub-fork: Allows forking the current repository on GitHub and adds a git remote for it. You can see the entire list of commands on the Hub Man Page. Most of these commands are expected to be run in a context of an existing local git repository. What are the advantages of using Hub Contributing to open source: This tool makes contributing to open source much easier by providing features for fetching repositories, navigating project pages, forking repos, and even submitting pull requests, all from the command-line. Script your workflows: You can easily script your workflows and set priorities by listing and creating issues, pull requests, and GitHub releases. Easily maintain projects: It allows you to easily fetch from other forks, review pull requests, and cherry-pick URLs. Use GitHub for work: It saves your time by allowing you to open pull requests for code reviews and push to multiple remotes at once. It also supports GitHub Enterprise, however, it needs to be whitelisted.  Hub is not the only tool of its kind, there are tools like Magit Forge and Lab. Though developers think that it is convenient, some feel that it increases GitHub lock-in. "While it is pretty cool, using such tool increases general lock-in to GitHub, in terms of both habits and potential use of it for automation of processes," a user expressed its opinion on Hacker News.  Another Hacker News user suggested, “I wish there was an open standard for operations that hub allows to do and all major Git forges, including open source ones, such as Gogs/Gitea and GitLab, supported it. In that case having a command-line tool that, like Git itself, is not tied to a particular vendor, but allows to do what hub does, could have been indispensable.” To know more in detail, check out Hub’s GitHub repository. Pull Panda is now a part of GitHub; code review workflows now get better! Github Sponsors: Could corporate strategy eat FOSS culture for dinner?

Yesterday, the team at Gitlab released GitLab 11.7, an application for the DevOps lifecycle that helps the developer teams work together efficiently to secure their code. GitLab 11.7 comes with features like multi-level child epics, API integration with Kubernetes, cross-project pipeline and more. What’s new in GitLab 11.7 Managing releases with GitLab 11.7 This version of GitLab eliminates the need for manual collection of source code, build output, or metadata associated with a released version of the source code. GitLab 11.7 comes with releases in GitLab Core which helps users to have release snapshots that include the source code and related artifacts. Multi-level child epics for work breakdown structures This release comes with multi-level child epics in GitLab portfolio management which allow users to create multi-level work breakdown structures. It also helps in managing complex projects and work plans. This structure builds a direct connection between planning and actionable issues. Users can now have an epic containing both issues and epics. Streamlining JavaScript development with NPM registries This release also delivers NPM registries in GitLab Premium that provides a standard and secure way to share and version control NPM packages across projects. Users can then share a package-naming convention for utilizing libraries in any Node.js project and NPM. Remediating vulnerabilities GitLab 11.7 helps users to remediate vulnerabilities in the apps and suggest a solution for Node.js projects managed with Yarn. Users can download a patch file, and apply it to their repo using the git apply command. They can then push changes back to their repository and the security dashboard will then confirm if the vulnerability is gone. This process is easy and reduces the time required to deploy a solution. API integration with Kubernetes This release comes with API support to Kubernetes integration. All the actions that are available in the GUI currently, such as listing, adding, and deleting a Kubernetes cluster are now accessible with the help of the API. Developers can use this feature to fold in cluster creation as part of their workflow. Cross-project pipeline With this release, it is now possible to expand upstream or downstream cross-project pipelines from the pipeline view. Users can view the pipelines across projects. Search filter box for issue board navigation This release comes with a search filter that makes navigation much easier. Users can simply type a few characters in the search filter box to narrow down to the issue board they are interested in. Project list redesign Project list UI is redesigned in GitLab 11.7 and mainly focuses on readability and summary of the project’s activity. Import issues CSV This release makes transitions easier. Users can now import issues into GitLab while managing their existing work. This feature works with Jira or any other issue tracking system that can generate a CSV export. Support catch-all email mailboxes This release supports sub-addressing and catch-all email mailboxes with a new email format that allows more email servers to be used with GitLab, including Microsoft Exchange and Google Groups. Include CI/CD files from other projects and templates With this release, users can now include their snippets of configuration from other projects and predefined templates. This release also includes snippets for specific jobs, like sast or dependency_scanning, so users can use them instead of copying and pasting the current definition. GitLab Runner 11.7 The team at GitLab also released GitLab Runner 11.7 yesterday. It is an open source project that is used to run CI/CD jobs and send the results back to GitLab. Major improvements In GitLab 11.7, the performance of viewing merge requests has been improved by caching syntax highlighted discussion diffs. Push performance has been improved by skipping pre-commit validations that have passed on other branches. Redundant counts in snippets search have been removed. This release comes with Mattermost 5.6, an open source Slack-alternative that includes interactive message dialogs, new admin tools, Ukrainian language support, etc. Users are generally happy with GitLab 11.7 release. One of the users who has been using GitLab for quite some time now is waiting for MR[0]. They commented on Hacker News, “I'm impatiently waiting for this MR [0] that will allow dependant containers to also talk to each other. It's the last missing piece for my ideal CI setup.” To which, GitLab’s product manager for Verify (CI) replied, “Thanks for bringing this up I hadn't seen your contribution! I think this is a great idea. I know the technical team has been overwhelmed with community contributions as of late - which is a good problem to have but one that we're still solving. I'm going to try and shepherd this one along myself.” Some users think if GitLab can pull off the npm registry well, then this might prove to be the beginning of a universal package management server built into Gitlab. One of the comments reads, “Gitlab API is amazingly simple and flexible, can be used efficiently from the terminal to list CI jobs, your issues, edit them.” Users are also comparing GitLab with GitHub, where some users are supporting GitHub. One user commented, “GitLab’s current homepage hides their actual site (the repositories) and makes it hard as a developer to actually get started compared to Github.” Another user commented, “We've started using Gitlab where I work and it's so much better than GitHub.” Users are also facing issues with memory optimization. One of the comments reads, “I like GitLab but noticed my Docker container running it is steadily requiring more memory to run smoothly. It’s sitting at 12GB right now, which is a little too high for my taste. I wish there were ways to reduce this.” Introducing GitLab Serverless to deploy cloud-agnostic serverless functions and applications GitLab 11.5 released with group security and operations-focused dashboard, control access to GitLab pages GitLab 11.4 is here with merge request reviews and many more features

Netflix in their tech blog announced that their popular cloud gateway Zuul 2 is now open-source. Zuul 2 was announced back in 2016 is Netflix's Java-based API gateway that handles all the request for Netflix's user base. Zuul 2 is the front door, acting as a filter to any request that comes into the Netflix's server. This gateway monitors the request and routes the request to the appropriate service to then act on the request. Zuul, in a way, is responsible for keeping Netflix standing strong and fulfilling your streaming requests. Netflix is known for open sourcing a lot of the tools developed in-house for the community. Zuul 2 is a battle-tested tool as it has been handling the massive Netflix infrastructure. Since its open sourcing, the developers have an option of a more resilient tool that can be used in their infrastructure architecture. Netflix promises to keep the security aspect intact for the open source Zuul 2. Also to add to this news, Netflix announced some more features for Zuul 2. Here are the feature additions: Server protocols: Zuul 2 has full support for HTTP/2 connections. Also, Mutual TLS will enhance Zuul's operation in secure infrastructure. Resiliency features: To increase the availability, Netflix will be adding a feature called Adaptive Retries that is used on Netflix. Also, it would be adding configurable concurrency limits for protecting the origins from getting overloaded and separating the other origins that run behind Zuul. Request Passport: This feature will enable the Zuul server to track all events that occur for each request. This will allow you to compute the asynchronous requests for better availability of your services. Status Categories: This feature helps you categorize the requests by extending the success and failure state in terms of HTTP status code. Request attempts: It tracks all the proxy attempts and provides you the status of each attempt. This really helps to identify the retries and to debug the routing. Zuul also has enhanced self-service routing, load balancing, anomaly detection, among other primary features that Netflix uses to keep the infrastructure secure and running. Netflix has released several other tools including Titus (container management), Conductor (microservice orchestration), Hystrix (cloud management), Vizceral (traffic management), among other efficient tools that can be used in large infrastructures. You can read Netflix's announcement blog to get more insights on the future development in Zuul 2. What software stack does Netflix use?

Update: At WWDC 2019, GitHub added support for Swift packages to GitHub Package Registry. Swift packages make it easy to share your libraries and source code across projects and with the Swift community. Last Friday, GitHub announced a new package management service to allow developers and organizations to easily generate "packages" from their code. Called the GitHub Package Registry, this service allows developers to publish public or private packages next to their source code. https://twitter.com/github/status/1127261105963917312 “GitHub Package Registry is compatible with common package management clients, so you can publish packages with your choice of tools,” Simina Pasat, director of Product Management at GitHub, explains in the official announcement. The GitHub Package Registry is available in limited beta for now. However, it will always be free to use for open source. The new service is currently compatible with JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet) and Docker images, with support for other languages and tools to come. Packages hosted on GitHub will include detailed insights such as download statistics and project/package history. Developers can also publish multiple packages of different types for more complex repositories. They can also customize publishing and post-publishing workflows using webhooks and GitHub Actions. GitHub Package Registry has unified identity and permissions meaning packages on GitHub inherit the visibility and permissions associated with the repository. This means, organizations no longer need to maintain a separate package registry and mirror permissions across systems. They can use a single set of credentials across different systems for code and packages, and manage access permissions with the same tools. Developers are generally enthusiastic about the new GitHub Venture. Here are some positive comments from a thread on Hacker News. “This is really outstanding. GitHub Package Registry separates the registry from the artifact storage, which is the right way to do it. The registry should be quick to update because it's only a pointer. The artifact storage will be under my control. Credentials and security should be easier to deal with. I really hope this works out.” “This is pretty interesting. Github really is becoming the social network that MS never seemed to be able to create. We already use it as our portfolio of work for potential employers. We collaborate with fellow enthusiasts and maybe even make new friends. We host our websites from it. Abuse it to store binaries, too. And now, alongside, source code we can use it as a CDN of sorts to serve packages, for free, sounds pretty great.” “It's a really nice project overall, having a GitHub Package Registry that supports many different projects and run by a company that today is good, is always nice.” GitHub deprecates and then restores Network Graph after GitHub users share their disapproval Apache Software Foundation finally joins the GitHub open source community Introducing Gitpod, a one-click IDE for GitHub

The makers of Sublime Text have released a new Git client yesterday. Called Sublime Merge, this tool combines the user interface of Sublime Text, with a from-scratch implementation of Git. The result is a Git client with a better and familiar interface. Sublime Merge has no time limit, no metrics, and with no tracking done on your usage. It has two themes, light and dark. The evaluation version is fully functional, but does not have the dark theme. You don’t need an account for the evaluation version. Here are some of the features of Sublime Merge. An integrated merge tool An integrated merge tool allows resolving conflicts in Sublime Merge itself instead of having to open another editor. There is a 3-pane view for viewing conflicts. The changes done by you are on the left, and by others, on the right. The resolved text is displayed on a pane in the center with buttons to choose between what changes to accept. Advanced diffs For cases where necessary, Sublime Merge will display exactly which individual characters have been changed for a commit. This includes renames, moves, resolving conflicts or just looking at the commit history. It can be done simply by selecting any two commits in Sublime Merge with Ctrl+Left Mouse to show the diff between them. Key bindings There are also good keyboard usability options. The Tab key can be used to navigate through different parts of the application. Space bar can toggle expansion, and Enter can stage/unstage hunks. The Command Palette allows quick access to a large set of Git commands and is triggered by Ctrl+P. Command line integration Sublime Merge will work hand-in-hand with the command line. All repository changes are updated live and things work the same from the command line as they would from the UI. So either the GUI or the command line can be used for different functions, the choice is yours. The smerge tool that comes with Sublime Merge can be used to open repositories, blame files, and search for commits. Advanced search Sublime Merge features find-as-you-type search to find the commit with exact matches. You can search for commit messages, commit authors, file names, and even wildcard patterns. Complex search queries can also be constructed using ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘()’ symbols for deep searches within folders. Use of real Git Working with Sublime Merge means you're working with the real Git, and not just a simplified version. Hovering over the buttons will show you which command it will run. Sublime Merge uses the same lingo as Git, and it doesn't make use of any state beyond Git itself. It uses a custom implementation of Git for reading repositories that drives high performance functionalities. However, Git itself, is directly used in Sublime Merge for repository mutating operations like staging, committing, checking out branches, etc. Downloads and licence Individual licences are lifetime with three years of updates included. For business licenses, subscription is available. Sublime Merge is in its early stages and has only been used by the makers and a small team of beta testers. Now they have invited other users to try it as well. You can download and read more about the Git Client from the Sublime Merge website. TypeScript 3.0 is finally released with ‘improved errors’, editor productivity and more GitHub introduces ‘Experiments’, a platform to share live demos of their research projects Packt’s GitHub portal hits 2,000 repositories

The Java team is planning to remove the Java Serialization feature from core Java language. This is owing to some security issues with the object serialization API. What is Java’s Object Serialization feature? The Serialization API converts the message in a data communication system into a sequence of bytes which can be processed further. The sequence of bytes is made into an object and written in a Java file. This file can be read and deserialized to recreate the message in the memory. Why is Oracle calling it a mistake? Approximately one-third of all the vulnerabilities in the Java systems have serialization involved. Mark Reinhold, chief Architect from Oracle mentioned that Oracle has been receiving reports that revealed the security weakness in Java Serialization. They have found a lot of applications servers receive serialization data streams on unprotected ports of a server. The attackers can use the easy use case of the serialized object and deserialize to recreate the object. Adding to the overhaul, Reinhold called the serialization feature as a “horrible mistake” made in 1997. To counteract these vulnerabilities, Oracle has added a filtering capability in Java to provide a defense mechanism for the network using serialization and receiving untrusted data streams. Oracle also mentioned their plans to remove serialization from Java as a long-term plan under Project Amber, focussed on streamlining the release cycle of Java and to enhance the productivity of the Java language in the Java 11 release. Looking ahead To continue to support the serialization in Java language, Oracle is planning to add a Serialization feature that will enable object serialization in a safe way. The framework will also be developed to support graphs, that supports JSON or XML to provide serialization of any record. Why Oracle is losing the Database Race What Google, RedHat, Oracle, and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 What can you expect from Java 11

This year’s Linux Plumbers Conference concluded on the 11th of September 2019. This invitation-only conference for Linux top kernel developers was held in Lisbon, Portugal this year. The conference brings developers working on the plumbing of Linux - kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, etc. to think about core design problems. Unlike most tech conferences that generally discuss the future of the Linux operating system, the Linux Plumbers Conference has a distinct motive behind it. In an interview with ZDNet, Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator said, “The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn't even talk about technical issues. It's all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel.” In short, the developers attending the conference know confidential and intimate details about some of the Linux kernel subsystems, and maybe this is why the conference has the word ‘Plumbers’ in it. Read Also: Introducing kdevops, a modern DevOps framework for Linux kernel development The conference is divided into several working sessions focusing on different plumbing topics. This year the Linux Plumbers Conference had over 18 microconferences, with topics like RISC-V, tracing, distribution kernels, live patching, open printing, toolchains, testing and fuzzing, and more. Some Micro conferences covered in Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 The Linux Plumbers 2019 RISC-V MC (microconference) focussed on finding the solutions for changing the kernel. In the long run, this discussion of changing the kernel is expected to result in active developer participation for code review/patch submissions for a better and more stable kernel for RISC-V. Some of the topics covered in RISC-V MC included RISC-V platform specification progress and fixing the Linux boot process in RISC-V. The Plumbers Live Patching MC had an open discussion for all the involved stakeholders to discuss the live patching related issues such that it will help in making the live patching of the Linux kernel and the Linux userspace live patching feature complete. This open discussion has been a success in past conferences as it leads to useful output which helps in pushing the development of the live patching forward. Some of the topics included all the happenings in kernel live in the last one year, API for state changes made by callbacks and source-based livepatch creation tooling. The System Boot and Security MC concentrated on open source security, including bootloaders, firmware, BMCs and TPMs. The potential speakers and key participants for the MC had everybody interested in GRUB, iPXE, coreboot, LinuxBoot, SeaBIOS, UEFI, OVMF, TianoCore, IPMI, OpenBMC, TPM, and other related projects and technologies. The main goal of this year’s Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) MC was to resolve the open issues in RDMA and PCI peer to peer for GPU and NVMe applications, including HMM and DMABUF topics, RDMA and DAX, contiguous system memory allocations for userspace which is unresolved from 2017 and many more. Other areas of interest included multi-vendor virtualized 'virtio' RDMA, non-standard driver features and their impact on the design of the subsystem, and more. Read Also: Linux kernel announces a patch to allow 0.0.0.0/8 as a valid address range Linux developers who attended the Plumbers 2019 conference were appreciative of the conference and took to Twitter to share their experiences. https://twitter.com/russelldotcc/status/1172193214272606209 https://twitter.com/odeke_et/status/1173108722744225792 https://twitter.com/jwboyer19/status/1171351233149448193 The videos of the conference are not out yet. The team behind the conference has tweeted that they will be uploading them soon. Keep checking this space for more details about the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019. Meanwhile, you can check out last year’s talks on YouTube. Latest news in Linux Lilocked ransomware (Lilu) affects thousands of Linux-based servers Microsoft announces its support for bringing exFAT in the Linux kernel; open sources technical specs IBM open-sources Power ISA and other chips; brings OpenPOWER foundation under the Linux Foundation

Last week, Microsoft announced in a blog that IntelliCode code completion suggestions will come to Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2019. There are some common usage patterns that occur after coding for some time. For example, an open stream will be closed eventually. When a string is used in the context of an if-statement, it is usually to check if the string is empty or has a certain size. Developers identify and use these coding patterns over time. IntelliCode already knows these common patterns and can suggest them to the developers as code. With the help of machine learning, IntelliCode trains over thousands of real-world projects which includes open-source projects on GitHub. So, IntelliCode will be of most help to developers when using common libraries like STL. IntelliCode saves time by putting most used items on the top of the IntelliSense completion list. On using the IntelliCode extension for a while, starred items will begin to appear at the top of Member List. They are IntelliCode recommendations. In a future release of the extension, Microsoft will give C++ developers the ability to let IntelliCode learn from their own code. They are also considering adding C++ IntelliCode support to Visual Studio Code. This is a welcome feature for developers, as it saves them time. A comment on Hacker News reads: “That's very nice and I'll probably be using it a lot, after VS2019 will stabilize (it's just a preview now). However, the fact that this thing works so well, says a lot about the design of C++ standard library. They should have encapsulated the pair of iterators into a single structure, and implement implicit casts from vectors/arrays to that object. Requiring to type begin/end every single time is counterproductive.” For more details, visit the Microsoft Blog. Visual Studio 2019: New features you should expect to see Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio Microsoft releases the Python Language Server in Visual Studio

Ruby 2.6.0 was released yesterday and brings a new JIT compiler. The new version also has the RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module. The new JIT compiler in Ruby 2.6.0 Ruby 2.6.0 comes with an early implementation of a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. The JIT compiler was introduced in Ruby to improve the performance of programs made with Ruby. Traditional JIT compilers operate in-process but Ruby’s JIT compiler gives out C code to the disk and generates a common C compiler to create native code. To enable the JIT compiler, you just need to specify --jit either on the command line or in the $RUBYOPT environment variable. Using --jit-verbose=1 will cause the JIT compiler to print additional information. The JIT compiler will work only when Ruby is built by GCC, Clang, or Microsoft Visual C++. Any of these compilers need to be available at runtime. On Optcarrot, a CPU intensive benchmark, Ruby 2.6 has 1.7x faster performance compared to Ruby 2.5. The JIT compiler, however, is still experimental and workloads like Rails might not benefit from for now. The RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module Ruby 2.6 brings the RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module and the team does not guarantee any future compatibility of this module. The module has a parse method, which parses the given string as Ruby code and returns the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) nodes in the code. The given file is opened and parsed by the parse_file method as Ruby code, this returns AST nodes. A RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree::Node class—another experimental feature—is also introduced in Ruby 2.6.0. Developers can get source location and children nodes from the Node objects. To know more about other new features and improvements in detail, visit the Ruby 2.6.0 release notes. 8 programming languages to learn in 2019 Clojure 1.10 released with Prepl, improved error reporting and Java compatibility NumPy drops Python 2 support. Now you need Python 3.5 or later.

After releasing version 1.36.0 last month, the team behind Rust announced the release of Rust 1.37.0 yesterday. Among the highlights of this version are support for referring to enum variants via type aliases, built-in cargo vendor, unnamed const items, profile-guided optimization, and more. Key updates in Rust 1.37.0 Referring to enum variants through type aliases Starting with this release, you can refer to enum variants through type aliases in expression and pattern contexts. Since Self behaves like a type alias in implementations, you can also refer to enum variants with Self::Variant. Built-in Cargo support for vendored dependencies Until now the cargo vendor command was available as a separate crate to developers. Starting with Rust 1.37.0, it is integrated directly into Cargo, the Rust package manager, and crate host. This Cargo subcommand fetches all the crates.io and git dependencies for a project into the vendor/ directory. It also shows the configuration necessary to use the vendored code during builds. Using unnamed const items for macros Rust 1.37.0 allows you to create unnamed const items. So, instead of giving an explicit name to your constants, you can name them as ‘_’. This update will enable you to easily create ergonomic and reusable declarative and procedural macros for static analysis purposes. Support for profile-guided optimization Rust’s compiler, rustc now supports Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) through the -C profile-generate and -C profile-use flags. PGO allows the compiler to optimize your code based on feedback for real workloads. It optimizes a program in the following two steps: The program is first built with instrumentation inserted by the compiler. This is achieved by passing the -C profile-generate flag to rustc. This instrumented program is then run on sample data and the profiling data is written to a file. The program is built again, however, this time the collected profiling data is fed into rustc by using the -C profile-use flag. This build will use the collected data to enable the compiler to make better decisions about code placement, inlining, and other optimizations. Choosing a default binary in Cargo projects The cargo run command allows you to run a binary or example of the local package enabling you to quickly test CLI applications. It often happens that there are multiple binaries present in the same packages. In such cases, developers need to explicitly mention the name of the binary they want to run with the --bin flag. This makes the cargo run command not as ergonomic, especially when we are calling a binary more often than the others. To solve this issue, Rust 1.37.0 introduces a new key in Cargo.toml called default-run. Declaring this key in the [package] section will make the cargo run command default to the chosen binary if the --bin flag is not passed. Developers have already started testing out this new release. A developer who used  profile-guided optimization shared his experience on Hacker News, “The effect is very dependent on program structure and actual code running, but for a suitable application it's reasonable to expect anything from 5-15%, and sometimes much more (see e.g. Firefox reporting 18% here).” Others also speculated that async/await will come in Rust 1.39. “Seems like async/await is going to slip into Rust 1.39 instead.” Another user said, “Congrats! Like many I was looking forward to async/await in this release but I'm happy they've taken some extra time to work through any existing issues before releasing it.” Check out the official announcement by the Rust team to know more in detail. Rust 1.36.0 releases with a stabilized ‘Future’ trait, NLL for Rust 2015, and more Introducing Vector, a high-performance data router, written in Rust “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?”, US Congressman questions Facebook on Libra security design choices