Tech News - Application Development

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

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

Yesterday, the team behind Dark programming language has unveiled Darklang’s private beta version. Dark is a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure for building backends. Developers can write in the Dark language, using the Dark editor, and the program is hosted on Dark’s infrastructure. As a result, they can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have safe instant deployment, which the team is calling “deployless” development. According to the team, backends today are too complicated to build and they have designed Dark in a way to reduce that complexity. Ellen Chisa, CEO of the Dark says, “Today we’re releasing two videos showing how Dark works. And demonstrate how to build a backend application (an office sign-in app) in 10 minutes.” Paul Biggar, the CTO also talks about the Dark’s philosophy and the details of the language, the editor and the infrastructure. He also shows how they make “deployless” safe with feature flags and versioning, and how Dark allows to introspect and debug live requests. Alpha users of Darklang build backends for web and mobile applications The Dark team says that during the private alpha, developers have built entire backends in Dark. Chase Olivieri built Altitude, a flight deal subscription site. Julius Tarng moved the backend of Tokimeki Unfollow to Dark for scalability. Jessica Greenwalt & Pixelkeet ported Birb, their internal project tracker, into a SaaS for other design studios to use. The team has also seem alpha users build backends for web and mobile applications, internal tools, Slackbots, Alexa skills, and personal projects. And they’ve even started building parts of Dark in Dark, including their presence service and large parts of the signup flow. Additionally, the team will let you in the private beta of Darklang immediately if the developers have their project well-scoped and ready to get started. Community unhappy with private version, and expect open-source On Hacker News, users are discussing that in this time and age if there is any new programming language, it has to be open-source. One of them commented, “Is there an open source version of the language? ...bc I'm not touching a programming language with a ten foot pole if it hasn't got at least two implementations, and at least one open source :| Sure, keep the IDEs and deployless infrastructure and all proprietary, but a core programming language in 2019 can only be open-source. Heck, even Microsoft gets it now.” Another one says, “They are 'allowing' people into a private beta of a programming language? Coupled with the fact it is not open source and has a bunch of fad ad-tech videos on the front page this is so many red flags.” While others compare Dark with different programming languages, mainly Apex, Rust and Go. A user comment reads, “I see a lot of Parse comparisons, but for me this is way more like Force.com from Salesforce and the Apex language. Proprietary language (Apex, which is Java 6-ish), complete vertical integration, no open source spec or implementation.” Another one says, “Go - OK, it has one implementation (open-source), but it's backed by one big player (Google) and used by many others... also the simplicity at core design decisions sound like the kind of choices that would make an alternative compiler easier to implement than for other languages Rust - pretty fast growing open-source community despite only one implementation... but yeah I'm sort of worried that Rust is a "hard to implement" kind of language with maybe a not high enough bus factor... similar worries for Julia too But tbh I'm not drawn much to either Go and Rust for other reasons - Go is too verbose for my taste, no way to write denser code that highlights the logic instead of the plumbing, and it has a "dumb" type system, Rust seems a really bad choice for rapid prototyping and iteration which is what I care about now.” Other interesting news in programming this week Introducing ‘ixy’, a simple user-space network driver written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and C#, among others TextMate 2.0, the text editor for macOS releases GNU community announces ‘Parallel GCC’ for parallelism in real-world compilers

.NET Core 3.0 was announced in May this year, it adds support for building desktop applications using WinForms, WPF, and Entity Framework 6. Updates to .NET Framework were also announced which enable use of new modern controls from UWP in existing WinForms and WPF applications. Now, more details are out on both of them. .NET Core 3.0 .NET Core 3.0 addresses three scenarios asked by the .NET framework developer community. Multiple versions of .NET on the same machine As of now, only one version of .NET Framework can be installed on a machine. An update to the .NET Framework poses a risk of a security fix, bug fix, or new API breaking applications on the machine. Now Microsoft aims to solve this problem by allowing multiple versions of .NET Core  to reside on one machine. The applications that need to be stable can be locked to one of the stable versions then later on be moved to use the newer version as it is ready. Embedding .NET directly into an application Since there can only be one version of .NET Framework on a machine, to take advantage of the latest framework or language features, the newer version needs to be installed. With .NET Core, you can now ship the framework as a part of an application. This enables developers to take advantage of the new features of the latest version without having to wait for the framework to install. Taking advantage of .NET Core features The side-by-side nature of .NET enables introduction of new innovative APIs and Base Class Library (BCL) improvements without the risk of breaking compatibility. WinForms and WPF applications on Windows can now take advantage of the latest .NET Core features. These features include more fundamental fixes for a better high-DPI support. .NET Framework 4.8 .NET Framework 4.8 also addresses three scenarios asked for by the .NET Framework developer community. Modern browser and media controls .NET desktop applications use the Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player for displaying HTML and playing media files. These legacy controls don’t show the latest HTML or play the latest media files. Hence, Microsoft is adding new controls to advantage of Microsoft Edge and newer media players thereby supporting the latest standards. Access to touch and UWP Controls The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) contains new controls to take advantage of the latest Windows features and the devices with touch displays. The code in your application does not have to be rewritten to use these new features and controls. Microsoft is going to make them available to WinForms and WPF enabling the developers to take advantage of these new features in the existing code of applications created. Improvements for high DPI The standard resolution of computer displays is steadily becoming 4K and now even 8K resolutions are available. WIth the newer versions WinForms and WPF applications will look great on these high resolution displays. The future of .NET .NET Framework is installed over one billion machines, hence even a security fix introducing a bug will affect a lot of devices. .NET Core is a fast-moving version of .NET. Because of its side-by-side nature it can take changes that can prove very risky in .NET Framework. Meaning, .NET Core is bound to get new APIs and language features over time that .NET Framework cannot. If your existing applications are on .NET Framework, there is no immediate need to move to .NET Core. For more details, visit the Microsoft Blog. .NET Core 2.0 reaches end of life, no longer supported by Microsoft .NET announcements: Preview 2 of .NET Core 2.2 and Entity Framework Core 2.2, C# 7.3, and ML.NET 0.5 Microsoft’s .NET Core 2.1 now powers Bing.com

Yesterday, at the ongoing .NET Conference 2019, NET Core 3.0 was released along with ASP.NET Core 3.0 and Blazor updates. C#8 and F# 4.7 is also a part of this release. Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3 are now generally available. What’s new in .NET Core 3.0 .NET Core 3.0 now includes adding Windows Forms and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), adding new JSON APIs, support for ARM64, and improving performance across the board. Here are the key highlights: Support for Windows Desktop apps .NET Core supports Windows Desktop apps for both Windows Forms and WPF (and open source). The WPF designer is part of Visual Studio 2019 16.3, which was also released yesterday. This includes new templates and an updated XAML designer and XAML Hot Reload. The Windows Forms designer is still in preview and available as a VSIX download. Support for C# 8 and F# 4.7 C# 8 was released last week and adds async streams, range/index, more patterns, and nullable reference types. F# 4.7 was released in parallel to .NET Core 3.0 with a focus on infrastructural changes to the compiler and core library and some relaxations on previously onerous syntax requirements. It also includes support for LangVersion and ships with nameof and opening of static classes in preview. Read Also: Getting started with F# for .Net Core application development [Tutorial] .NET Core apps now have executables by default This means apps can now be launched with an app-specific executable, like myapp or ./myapp, depending on the operating system. Support for new JSON APIs High-performance JSON APIs have been added, for reader/writer, object model, and serialization scenarios. These APIs minimize allocations, resulting in faster performance, and much less work for the garbage collector. Support for Raspberry Pi and Linux ARM64 chips These chips enable IoT development with the remote Visual Studio debugger. You can deploy apps that listen to sensors, and print messages or images on a display, all using the new GPIO APIs. ASP.NET can be used to expose data as an API or as a site that enables configuring an IoT device. Read Also: .NET Core 3.0 Preview 6 is available, packed with updates to compiling assemblies. .NET Core 3.0 is a ‘current’ release and will be available with RHEL 8. It will be superseded by .NET Core 3.1, targeted for November 2019. If you're on .NET Core 2.2 you have until the end of the year to update to 3.1, which will be LTS. You can read a detailed report of all .NET Core 3.0 features. What's new in ASP.NET Core 3.0 ASP.NET Core 3.0 is also released in parallel to .NET Core for building web apps. Notably, ASP.NET Core 3.0 has Blazor, a new framework in ASP.NET Core for building interactive client-side web UI with .NET. With Blazor, you can create rich interactive UIs using C# instead of JavaScript. You can also share server-side and client-side app logic written in .NET. Blazor renders the UI as HTML and CSS for wide browser support, including mobile browsers. Other updates in ASP.NET Core 3.0: You can now create high-performance backend services with gRPC. SignalR now has support for automatic reconnection and client-to-server streaming. Endpoint routing integrated through the framework. HTTP/2 now enabled by default in Kestrel. Authentication support for Web APIs and single-page apps integrated with IdentityServer Support for certificate and Kerberos authentication. New generic host sets up common hosting services like dependency injection (DI), configuration, and logging. New Worker Service template for building long-running services. For a full list of features, visit Microsoft Docs. Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3 are now generally available with C# 8 As a part of the .NET Core 3.0 release, Entity Framework Core 3.0 and Entity Framework 6.3 are now generally available on nuget.org. New updates in EF Core 3.0 include: Newly architectured LINQ provider to translate more query patterns into SQL, generating efficient queries in more cases, and preventing inefficient queries from going undetected. Cosmos DB support to help developers familiar with the EF programming model to easily target Azure Cosmos DB as an application database. EF 6.3 brings the following new improvements to the table: With support for .NET Core 3.0, the EF 6.3 runtime package now targets .NET Standard 2.1 in addition to .NET Framework 4.0 and 4.5. Support for SQL Server hierarchyid Improved compatibility with Roslyn and NuGet PackageReference Added the ef6.exe utility for enabling, adding, scripting, and applying migrations from assemblies. This replaces migrate.exe .NET Core 3.0 is a major new release of .NET Core. Developers have widely appreciated the announcement. https://twitter.com/dotMorten/status/1176172319598759938 https://twitter.com/robertmclaws/status/1176206536546357248 https://twitter.com/JaypalPachore/status/1176200191021473792 Interested developers can start updating their existing projects to target .NET Core 3.0. The release is compatible with earlier .NET Core versions which makes updating easier. Other interesting news in Tech Introducing Weld, a runtime written in Rust and LLVM for cross-library optimizations. Chrome 78 beta brings the CSS Properties and Values API, the native File Systems API and more. LLVM 9 releases with official RISC-V target support, asm goto, Clang 9 and more.

Two days ago, Jeremy Soller, the Redox OS BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) shared recent developments in Redox which is a Unix-like operating system written in Rust. The Redox OS team is pretty close to running rustc, the compiler for the Rust programming language on Redox. However, dynamic libraries are a remaining area that needs to be improved. https://twitter.com/redox_os/status/1199883423797481473 Redox is a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications. In March this year, Redox OS 0.50 was released with support for Cairo, Pixman, and other libraries and packages. Ongoing developments in Redox OS Soller says that he has been running the Redox OS on a System76 Galago Pro (galp3-c) along with the System76 Open Firmware and has found the work satisfactory till now. “My work on real hardware has improved drivers and services, added HiDPI support to a number of applications, and spawned the creation of new projects such as pkgar to make it easier to install Redox from a live disk,” quotes Soller in the official Redox OS news page. Furthermore, he notified users that Redox has also become easier to cross-compile since the redoxer tool can now build, run, and test. It can also automatically manage a Redox toolchain and run executables for Redox inside of a container on demand. However, “compilation of Rust binaries on Redox OS”, is one of the long-standing issues in Redox OS, that has garnered much attention for the longest time. According to Soller, through the excellent work done by ids1024, a member of the GSoC Project, Readox OS had almost achieved self-hosting. Later, the creation of the relibc (a C library written in Rust) library and the subsequent work done by the contributors of this project led to the development of the POSIX C compatibility library. This gave rise to a significant increase in the number of available packages. With a large number of Rust crates suddenly gaining Redox OS support, “it seemed that as though the dream of self-hosting would soon be reality”, however, after finding some errors in relibc, Soller realized, “rustc is no longer capable of running statically linked!”  Read More: Rust 1.39 releases with stable version of async-await syntax, better ergonomics for match guards, attributes on function parameters, and more Finally, the team shifted its focus to relibc’s ld_so which provides dynamic linking support for executables. However, this has caused a temporary halt to porting rustc to Redox OS. Building Redox OS on Redox OS is one of the highest priorities of the Redox OS project. Soller has assured its users that Rustc is a few months away from being run permanently. He also adds that with Redox OS being a microkernel, it is possible that even the driver level could be recompiled and respawned without downtime, which will make the operating system exceedingly fast to develop. In the coming months, he will be working on increasing the efficiency of porting more software and tackling more hardware support issues. Eventually, Soller hopes that he will be able to successfully develop Redox OS which would be a fully self-hosted, microkernel operating system written in Rust. Users are excited about the new developments in Redox OS and have thanked Soller for it. One Redditor commented, “I cannot tell you how excited I am to see the development of an operating system with greater safety guarantees and how much I wish to dual boot with it when it is stable enough to use daily.” Another Redditor says, “This is great! Love seeing updates to this project 👍” https://twitter.com/flukejones/status/1200225781760196609 Head over to the official Redox OS news page for more details. AWS will be sponsoring the Rust Project A Cargo vulnerability in Rust 1.25 and prior makes it ignore the package key and download a wrong dependency Rust 1.38 releases with pipelined compilation for better parallelism while building a multi-crate project Homebrew 2.2 releases with support for macOS Catalina ActiveState adds thousands of curated Python packages to its platform

Yesterday, Apple released MacOS Catalina, its latest update for Macs and MacBooks. The new operating system can be installed from the homepage of its App Store. Catalina brings a host of new features, including the option to use apps from the iPad as well as turn the tablet into an additional display for computers. But this new update kills iTunes and faces some major issues. Apple has confirmed that there are some serious issues in MacOS Catalina, and affected consumers should refrain from updating the OS until these issues are addressed. Catalina is finally the download that kills iTunes, which is nowhere to be found in the new update. Instead, Apple has moved the features of iTunes into their own separate Music app, the new update also includes separate apps for Podcasts and TV. MacOS Catalina update is a big problem for DJs who rely on iTunes The Mac platform is especially popular with DJs, who cart around MacBook Pro machines jam-packed with music, playlists, mixes and specialist software to allow them to perform every evening. These have been tied to iTunes’ underlying XML database. But after nearly 2 decades, iTunes are discontinued in macOS Catalina, and the XML file no longer exists to index a local music collection. This has broken popular and niche music tools alike, including some of the major titles such as Traktor and Rekordbox. The Verge reports that Apple has confirmed that this issue is down to its removal of the XML file, but is handing responsibility to the third-party developers behind each app. Unfortunately, for Apple’s reputation, those developers have been expecting the ability for the new standalone Music app to explore an XML file, a feature Apple suggested would be available until they could code around the lack of XML. Fact Mag also reported, “this news contradicts Apple’s earlier assertion that there would be a way to manually export the XML file from the new Music app, though Catalina’s launch yesterday now proves this isn’t the case at all.” Apple advice DJs that, if you rely on a software that needs this XML file to function, then do not update to Catalina until individual developers have issued compatibility updates for the new operating system. Catalina drops support for 32-bit applications and faces other issues as well Catalina also drops support for 32-bit applications. The 32-bit applications will simply not run under the new system, this version of macOS is a 64-bit only. If you are a Mac user that is reliant on a 32-bit app, then you have just a single dialog on installation that warns of the loss of support. And with these there are other questions which a user will need answers to like, you would need to know which of your apps are 32-bit and which are 64-bit? And if they are mission-critical in your role and is a 64-bit alternative available? It's not just this, a number of creative tools, including Apple Aperture, Microsoft Office 2011 and Adobe CS6 are also experiencing issues with Catalina. Additionally, there are issues with font in MacOS Catalina, as per the Chromium blog, the macOS system font appears "off" -- too light / tight kerning. It is clear that Apple wants to push forward with its platforms, but it needs to remember that the hardware has to work in the real world today. Apple should be consistent in what features it offers, it should provide clear and accurate information to developers and users, and it should ensure the very least that its own store is in order. TextMate 2.0, the text editor for macOS releases MacOS terminal emulator, iTerm2 3.3.0 is here with new Python scripting API, a scriptable status bar, Minimal theme, and more Apple previews macOS Catalina 10.15 beta, featuring Apple music, TV apps, security, zsh shell, driverKit, and much more! WWDC 2019 highlights: Apple introduces SwiftUI, new privacy-focused sign in, updates to iOS, macOS, and iPad and more Apple plans to make notarization a default requirement in all future macOS updates

Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development is nearing the end of its competition for this year. A student developer named Victor Perevertkin has been successful in his GSoC 2018 project on Btrfs file-system support for ReactOS. He has been able to boot the Windows API/ABI compatible OS off Btrfs. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]ReactOS is a free and open Source operating system and is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Seven). [/box] For his GSoC 2018 project, Perevertkin has been working on Btrfs support within the ReactOS boot-loader as well as other fixes needed to allow for ReactOS to be installed on and boot from a Btrfs file-system. BTRFS is case-sensitive file system, so paths like /ReactOS/System32, /reactos/system32, /ReactOS/system32 are different here. However, Windows is written assuming that case does not matter during path lookup. This issue is solved in WinBtrfs driver, but for Freeloader it can be a bit tricky. After Perevertkin was done with the Freeloader development and had fixed the VirtualBox bug, he was able to get to first error message from btrfs-booted ReactOS. He later found out that this was due to a bug in WinBtrfs driver. A pull-request to the upstream repository with a bugfix is provided on GitHub repository. At present, ReactOS is able to boot from BTRFS partition and also is in quite stable state. However, some problems are yet to be addressed. Read about this news in detail on ReactOS Blog. ReactOS version 0.4.9 released with Self-hosting and FastFAT crash fixes Google’s App Maker, a low-code tool for building business apps, is now generally available 5 reasons you should learn to code

This month, during the Microsoft Build 2019, the team behind .NET Core announced that .NET Core 5 will be coming in 2020. Yesterday the team at .NET Core released the .NET Core May 2019 updates for 1.0.16, 1.1.14, 2.1.11 and 2.2.5. The updates include security, reliability fixes, and updated packages. Expected updates in .NET Core Security .NET Core Tampering Vulnerability(CVE-2019-0820) When .NET Core improperly processes RegEx strings, a denial of service vulnerability exists. In this case, the attacker who can successfully exploit this vulnerability can cause a denial of service against a .NET application. Even a remote unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by issuing specially crafted requests to a .NET Core application. This update addresses this vulnerability by correcting how .NET Core applications handle RegEx string processing. This security advisory provides information about a vulnerability in .NET Core 1.0, 1.1, 2.1 and 2.2. Denial of Service vulnerability in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core (CVE-2019-0980 & CVE-2019-0981) When .NET Core and ASP.NET Core improperly handle web requests, denial of service vulnerability exists. An attacker who can successfully exploit this vulnerability can cause a denial of service against a .NET Core and ASP.NET Core application. This vulnerability can be exploited remotely and without authentication. A remote unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by issuing specially crafted requests to a .NET Core application. This update addresses this vulnerability by correcting how .NET Core and ASP.NET Core web applications handle web requests. This security advisory provides information about the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-0980 & CVE-2019-0981) in .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.0, 1.1, 2.1, and 2.2. ASP.NET Core Denial of Service vulnerability(CVE-2019-0982) When ASP.NET Core improperly handles web requests, a denial of service vulnerability exists. An attacker who can successfully exploit this vulnerability can cause a denial of service against an ASP.NET Core web application. This vulnerability can be exploited remotely and without authentication. A remote unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability by issuing specially crafted requests to the ASP.NET Core application. This update addresses this vulnerability by correcting how the ASP.NET Core web application handles web requests. This security advisory provides information about a vulnerability (CVE-2019-0982) in ASP.NET Core 2.1 and 2.2. Docker images .NET Docker images have now been updated. microsoft/dotnet, microsoft/dotnet-samples, and microsoft/aspnetcore repos have also been updated. Users can get the latest .NET Core updates on the .NET Core download page. To know more about this news, check out the official announcement. .NET 5 arriving in 2020! Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 .NET for Apache Spark Preview is out now!  

Mozilla is constantly putting its efforts into improving Firefox’s devtools. One such effort is Firefox Replay, an experimental tool that allows Firefox content processes to record their behavior so that it can be replayed and rewound later. The main highlight of Firefox Replay is the “code timeline” that enables you to scan through every code execution at a glance. Along with execution points, the timeline also shows exceptions, events, and network requests in real-time. It also allows you to save your recordings and pick up where you left afterward. How Firefox Replay works The record and replay behavior is achieved by “controlling the non-determinism in the browser.” Initially, it records non-deterministic behaviors (intra-thread and inter-thread) and then replays it later to “force the browser to behave deterministically.” Firefox Replay includes IPC integration to enable communication between a recording or replaying process and the chrome process. Its rewind infrastructure allows a replaying process to restore a previous state. Its debugger integration enables the JS debugger to read the required information from a replaying process and control the process’s execution. Firefox Replay is not officially released yet, however, Mac users can give it try by downloading the nightly builds. Since it is still experimental, Firefox Replay is disabled by default. You can turn it on with the ‘devtools.recordreplay.enabled’ preference. Read also: Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature The team is working on support for other platforms as well. “Windows port work is underway but is not yet working.  The difficulties are in figuring out the set of system library APIs to intercept, in getting the memory management and dirty memory parts of the rewind infrastructure to work, and in handling the different graphics and IPC pathways on different platforms,” the official doc reads. In a discussion on Hacker News, many users were excited to try out this tool. A user commented, “This might be enough to get me to use Firefox to develop with. This could be huge for its market share, a big part of the reason chrome was able to become so popular was because of how good its devtools were (compared to the competition at the time). Firefox definitely managed to catch up but not before lots of devs switched to chrome and stopped checking for compatibility with Firefox.” “This will be an absolute game-changer for web development. I am currently working on a really simplified version of this but as a chrome extension. We deal with a lot of real-time data and have been facing some timing issues (network and user input) which is really hard to reproduce,” a user added. Check out Mozilla’s official docs to know more in detail. Firefox 70 released with better security, CSS, and JavaScript improvements The new WebSocket Inspector will be released in Firefox 71 Google and Mozilla to remove Extended Validation indicators in Chrome 77 and Firefox 70

Last month, the team at Fauna, provider of FaunaDB, the cloud-first database announced the general availability of its GraphQL API, a query language for APIs. With the support for GraphQL, FaunaDB now provides cloud database services in the market and allows developers to use any API of choice to manipulate all their data. GraphQL also helps developers with their productivity by enabling fast, easy development of serverless applications. It makes FaunaDB the only serverless backend that has support for universal database access. Matt Biilmann, CEO at Netlify, a Fauna partner said, “Fauna’s GraphQL support is being introduced at a perfect time as rich, serverless apps are disrupting traditional development models.” Biilmann added, “GraphQL is becoming increasingly important to the entire developer community as they continue to leverage JAMstack and serverless to simplify cloud application development. We applaud Fauna’s work as the first company to bring a serverless GraphQL database to market.” GraphQL helps developers in specifying the shape of the data they need without requiring changes to the backend components that provide data. The GraphQL API in FaunaDB helps teams in collaborating smoothly and allows back-end teams to focus on security and business logic, and helps front-end teams to concentrate on presentation and usability.  In 2017, the global serverless architecture market was valued at $3.46 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $18.04 billion by 2024 as per the Zion Research. GraphQL brings growth and development to serverless development so developers can look for back-end GraphQL support like the one found in FaunaDB. The GraphQL API also supports three general functions: Queries, Mutations, and Subscriptions and currently, FaunaDB natively supports Queries and Mutations.  FaunaDB's GraphQL API provides developers with uniform access to transactional consistency, quality of service (QoS), user authorization, data access, and temporal storage. No limits on data history FaunaDB is the only database that provides support without any limits on data history. Any API such as SQL in FaunaDB can return data at any given time. Consistency FaunaDB provides the highest consistency levels for its transactions that are automatically applied to all APIs. Authorization FaunaDB provides access control at the row level which is applicable to all APIs, be it GraphQL or SQL. Shared data access It also features shared data access, so the data which is written by one API (e.g., GraphQL) can be read and modified by another API such as FQL.  To know more about the news, check out the press release. 7 reasons to choose GraphQL APIs over REST for building your APIs Best practices for RESTful web services : Naming conventions and API Versioning [Tutorial] Implementing routing with React Router and GraphQL [Tutorial]