Tech News - Programming

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]

As promised by the Haiku team earlier this month, Haiku R1 now stands released in its beta version! After the big gap between Haikus’ latest release in November 2012, users can expect a lot more upgrades in the R1/beta1. The Haiku OS is known for its ease of use, responsiveness, and overall coherence. With improvements to its package manager, WebPositive, media subsystem and much more Haiku has made the wait worth its while! Let’s dive into some of the major upgrades of this release. #1  Package management The biggest upgrade in the R1 Beta is the addition of a complete package management system. Finalized and merged during 2013, Haiku packages are a special type of compressed filesystem image. These are ‘mounted’ upon installation and thereafter on each boot by the packagefs. It is worth noting that since packages are merely "activated", not installed, the bootloader has been given some capacity to affect them. Users can boot into a previous package state -in case they took a bad update- or even blacklist individual files. Installations and uninstallations of packages are practically instant. Users can manage the installed package set on a non-running Haiku system by mounting its boot disk and then manipulating the /system/packages directory and associated configuration files. The Haiku team has also introduced pkgman, the command-line interface to the package management system. Unlike most other package managers where packages can be installed only by name, Haiku packages can also be searched for and installed by provides, e.g. pkgman install cmd:rsync or pkgman install devel:libsdl2, which will locate the most relevant package that provides that, and install it. Accompanying the package manager is a massively revamped HaikuPorts, containing a wide array of both native and ported software for Haiku. #2 WebPositive upgrades The team has made the system web browser much more stable than before. Glitches with YouTube now stand fixed. While working on WebKit, the team also managed to fix a large number of bugs in Haiku itself - such as broken stack alignment, various kernel panics in the network stack, bad edge-case handling in app_server’s rendering core GCC upgrades and many more. HaikuWebKit now supports Gopher, which is its own network protocol layer. #3 Completely rewritten network preflet The newly rewritten network preflet, is designed for ease of use and longevity. In addition to the interface configuration screens, the preflet is also now able to manage the network services on the machine, such as OpenSSH and ftpd. It uses a plugin-based API, which helps third-party network services like VPNs, web servers, etc to integrate with it. #4 User interface cleanup & live color updates Mail and Tracker now sport Haiku-style toolbars and font-size awareness, among other applications. This will enable users to add proper DPI scaling and right-to-left layouts. Instead of requesting a specific system color and then manipulating it, most applications now instruct their controls to adopt certain colors based on the system color set directly. #5 Media subsystem improvements The Haiku team has made cleanups to the Media Kit to improve fault tolerance, latency correction, and performance issues. This will help with the Kit’s overall resilience. HTTP and RTSP streaming support integrated into the I/O layer of the Media Kit. Livestreams can now be played in WebPositive via HTML5 audio/video support, or in the native MediaPlayer. Significant improvements to the FFmpeg decoder plugin were made. Rather than the ancient FFmpeg 0.10, the last version that GCC2 can compile, FFmpeg 4.0 is now used all-around for a better support of both  audio and video formats, as well as significant performance improvements. The driver for HDA saw a good number of cleanups and wider audio support since the previous release. The DVB tuner subsystem saw a substantial amount of rework and the APE reader was also cleaned up and added to the default builds. #6 RemoteDesktop Haiku’s native RemoteDesktop application was improved and added to the builds. The RemoteDesktop forwards drawing commands from the host system to the client system, which for most applications consumes significantly lower bandwith. RemoteDesktop  can connect and run applications on any Haiku system that users have SSH access to, there is no need for a remote server. #7 New thread scheduler Haiku’s kernel thread scheduler is now O(1) (constant time) with respect to threads, and O(log N)(logarithmic time) with respect to processor cores. The new limit is 64 cores, this being an arbitrary constant that can be increased at any time. There are new implementations of the memcpy and memset primitives for x86 which constitute significant increases to their performance. #8 Updated Ethernet & WiFi drivers The ethernet & WiFi drivers, have been upgraded to those from FreeBSD 11.1. This brings in support for Intel’s newer “Dual Band” family, some of Realtek’s PCI chipsets, and newer-model chipsets in all other existing drivers. Additionally, the FreeBSD compatibility layer now interfaces with Haiku’s support for MSI-X interrupts, meaning that WiFi and ethernet drivers will take advantage of it wherever possible, leading to significant improvements in latency and throughput. #9 Updated file system drivers The NFSv4 client, was finally merged into Haiku itself, and is included by default. Additionally, Haiku’s userlandfs, which supports running filesystem drivers in userland, is now shipped along with Haiku itself. It supports running BeOS filesystem drivers, Haiku filesystem drivers, and provides FUSE compatibility. As a result, various FUSE-based filesystem drivers are now available in the ports tree, including FuseSMB, among others. Apart from the above mentioned features, users can look forward to EFI bootloader and GPT support, a build-in debugger, general system stabilization and much more! Reddit also saw comments from users waiting eagerly for this release: Source: Reddit  Source: Reddit After a long span of 17 years  from its day of launch, it would be interesting to see how this upgrade is received by the masses. To know more about Haiku R1, head over to their official site Sugar operating system: A new OS to enhance GPU acceleration security in web apps cstar: Spotify’s Cassandra orchestration tool is now open source! OpenSSL 1.1.1 released with support for TLS 1.3, improved side channel security  

On Monday, Gregory Szorc, a Developer Productivity Engineer at Airbnb, introduced PyOxidizer, a Python application packaging and distribution tool written in Rust. This tool is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. Sharing his vision behind this tool, Szorc wrote in the announcement, “I want PyOxidizer to provide a Python application packaging and distribution experience that just works with a minimal cognitive effort from Python application maintainers.” https://twitter.com/indygreg/status/1143187250743668736 PyOxidizer aims to solve complex packaging and distribution problems so that developers can put their efforts into building applications instead of juggling with build systems and packaging tools. According to the GitHub README, “PyOxidizer is a collection of Rust crates that facilitate building libraries and binaries containing Python interpreters.” Its most visible component is the ‘pyoxidizer’ command line tool. With this tool, you can create new projects, add PyOxidizer to existing projects, produce binaries containing a Python interpreter, and various related functionality. How PyOxidizer is different from other Python application packaging/distribution tools PyOxidizer provides the following benefits over other Python application packaging/distribution tools: It works across all popular platforms, unlike many other tools that only target Windows or macOS. It works even if the executing system does not have Python installed. It does not have special system requirements like SquashFS, container runtimes, etc. Its startup performance is comparable to traditional Python execution. It supports single file executables with minimal or none system dependencies. Here are some of the features PyOxidizer comes with: Generates a standalone single executable file One of the most important features of PyOxidizer is that it can produce a single executable file that contains a fully-featured Python interpreter, its extensions, standard library, and your application's modules and resources. PyOxidizer embeds self-contained Python interpreters as a tool and software library by exposing its lower-level functionality. Serves as a bridge between Rust and Python The ‘Oxidizer’ part in PyOxidizer comes from Rust. Internally, it uses Rust to produce executables and manage the embedded Python interpreter and its operations. Along with solving the problem of packaging and distribution with Rust, PyOxidizer can also serve as a bridge between these two languages. This makes it possible to add a Python interpreter to any Rust project and vice versa. With PyOxidizer, you can bootstrap a new Rust project that contains an embedded version of Python and your application. “Initially, your project is a few lines of Rust that instantiates a Python interpreter and runs Python code. Over time, the functionality could be (re)written in Rust and your previously Python-only project could leverage Rust and its diverse ecosystem,” explained Szorc. The creator chose Rust for the run-time and build-time components because it is considered to be one of the superior systems programming languages and does not require considerable effort solving difficult problems like cross-compiling. He believes that implementing the embedding component in Rust also opens more opportunities to embed Python in Rust programs. “This is largely an unexplored area in the Python ecosystem and the author hopes that PyOxidizer plays a part in more people embedding Python in Rust,” he added. PyOxidizer executables are faster to start and import During the execution, binaries built with PyOxidizer does not have to do anything special like creating a temporary directory to run the Python interpreter. Everything is loaded directly from the memory without any explicit I/O operations. So, when a Python module is imported, its bytecode is loaded from a memory address in the executable using zero-copy. This results in making the executables produced by PyOxidizer faster to start and import. PyOxidizer is still in its early stages. Yesterday’s initial release is good at producing executables embedding Python. However, not much has been implemented yet to solve the distribution part of the problem. Some of the missing features that we can expect to come in the future are an official build environment, support for C extensions, more robust packaging support, easy distribution, and more. The creator encourages Python developers to try this tool and share feedback with him or file an issue on GitHub. You can also contribute to this project via Patreon or PayPal. Many users are excited to try this tool: https://twitter.com/kevindcon/status/1143750501592211456 https://twitter.com/acemarke/status/1143389113871040517 Read the announcement made by Szorc to know more in detail. Python 3.8 beta 1 is now ready for you to test PyPI announces 2FA for securing Python package downloads Matplotlib 3.1 releases with Python 3.6+ support, secondary axis support, and more

Kotlin 1.3.60 was released yesterday with new features, as well as quality and tooling improvements. This release adds support for more Kotlin/Native platforms and targets. It also improves the Kotlin/MPP IDE experience. For Kotlin/JS, Kotlin 1.3.60 adds support for source maps and improves the platform test runner integration. The team has also significantly enhanced some “create expect” quick-fixes to the multiplatform side of Kotlin. IntelliJ IDEA and Kotlin Eclipse IDE plugin updates Scratch files are now redesigned and improved to let you see the results, which are shown in a different window. The Kotlin team is working on enhancing the user experience with Kotlin Gradle build scripts. Developers can set function breakpoints in the Kotlin code. The debugger will then stop execution on entering or exiting the corresponding function. Multiple improvements to Java-to-Kotlin converter. The kotlin-eclipse plugin now supports experimentally incremental compilation for single modules. Improvements to Kotlin/Native compiler in Kotlin 1.3.60 The Kotlin/Native compiler has compatibility with the latest tooling bits: XCode 11 and LLVM 8.0. It also adds new platforms/targets such as watchOS, tvOS, and Android (native). Kotlin 1.3.60 adds experimental symbolication of iOS crash reports for release binaries (including LLVM-inlined code, which is one step further than what XCode is able to decode). Thread-safe tracking of Objective-C weak/shared references to Kotlin objects. Support for suspend callable references. The ability to associate a work queue with any context/thread, not just the ones created ad⁠-⁠hoc through Worker.start. The kotlinx.cli project has been (mostly) rewritten and is included in this release of the Kotlin/Native compiler. The runtime performance of Kotlin/Native compiler has also been improved: interface calls are now up to 5x faster, and type checks up to 50x faster in Kotlin 1.3.60. The team has also shared upcoming changes planned for Kotlin 1.4 which is to be released in 2020. Currently, Kotlin 1.4 is available in the experimental state. You can find the complete list of Kotlin 1.3.60 changes in the changelog. Kotlin 1.3.50 released with ‘duration and time Measurement’ API preview, Dukat for npm dependencies, and more. Introducing Coil, an open-source Android image loading library backed by Kotlin Coroutines Microsoft announces .NET Jupyter Notebooks

Yesterday, AWS announced that it is sponsoring the popular Rust programming language. Rust has seen a lot of developments in AWS as it is used for various performance-sensitive components in its popular services such as Lambda, EC2, and S3. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla also use Rust for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. Alex Crichton, Rust Core Team Member says, “We’re thrilled that AWS, which the Rust project has used for years, is helping to sponsor Rust’s infrastructure. This sponsorship enables Rust to sustainably host infrastructure on AWS to ship compiler artifacts, provide crates.io crate downloads, and house automation required to glue all our processes together. These services span a myriad of AWS offerings from CloudFront to EC2 to S3. Diversifying the sponsorship of the Rust project is also critical to its long-term success, and we’re excited that AWS is directly aiding this goal.” Why AWS chose Rust Rust project maintainers say the reason AWS chose Rust is due to its blazingly fast and memory-efficient performance; its rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety; its great documentation, its friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling; and many other amazing features. Rust has also been voted as the “Most Loved Language” in Stack Overflow’s survey for the past four years. Rust also has an inclusive community along with top-notch libraries such as: Serde, for serializing and deserializing data. Rayon, for writing parallel & data race-free code. Tokio/async-std, for writing non-blocking, low-latency network services. tracing, for instrumenting Rust programs to collect structured, event-based diagnostic information. Rust too uses AWS services Rust project uses AWS services to: Store release artifacts such as compilers, libraries, tools, and source code on S3. Run ecosystem-wide regression tests with Crater on EC2. Operate docs.rs, a website that hosts documentation for all packages published to the central crates.io package registry. The AWS community is excited to include Rust in their community. It would be interesting to see the combination of Rust and AWS in their future implementations. Few users are confused about the nature of this sponsorship. A Redditor commented, “It's not clear exactly what this means - is it about how AWS provides S3/EC2 services for free to the Rust project already (which IIRC has been ongoing for some time), or is it an announcement of something new ($$$ or developer time being contributed?)?” To know about this announcement in detail, read AWS’ official blog post. Amazon announces improved VPC networking for AWS Lambda functions Reddit experienced an outage due to an issue in its hosting provider, AWS Rust 1.38 releases with pipelined compilation for better parallelism while building a multi-crate project Mozilla introduces Neqo, Rust implementation for QUIC, new http protocol

The Julia team yesterday announced a new version of the language, Julia v1.3. A few highlights of this release include new language features such as support for Unicode 12.1.0, support for Unicode bold digits and double-struck digits 0 through 9 as valid identifiers, and many more. What’s new in Julia v1.3? In this latest Julia v1.3, methods can now be added to an abstract type. Also, the syntax var"#str#" for printing and parsing non-standard variable names have been added. Multi-threading changes New experimental Threads.@spawn macro runs a task on any available thread. All system-level I/O operations (e.g. files and sockets) are now thread-safe. This does not include subtypes of IO that are entirely in-memory, such as IOBuffer, although it specifically does include BufferStream. The global random number generator (GLOBAL_RNG) is now thread-safe (and thread-local). New Channel(f::Function, spawn=true) keyword argument to schedule the created Task on any available thread, matching the behavior of Threads.@spawn. Simplified the Channel constructor, which is now easier to read and more idiomatic julia. Use of the keyword arguments csize and ctype is now discouraged. New library functions findfirst, findlast, findnext and findprev now accept a character as first argument to search for that character in a string passed as the second argument. Added new findall(pattern, string) method where pattern is a string or regex. Added sincosd(x) to simultaneously compute the sine and cosine of x, where x is in degrees (#30134). The function nonmissingtype, which removes Missing from type unions, has been exported. Standard library changes Regex can now be multiplied (*) and exponentiated (^), like strings. Cmd interpolation (`$(x::Cmd) a b c` where) now propagates x's process flags (environment, flags, working directory, etc) if x is the first interpolant and errors otherwise. Zero-dimensional arrays are now consistently preserved in the return values of mathematical functions that operate on the array(s) as a whole (and are not explicitly broadcasted across their elements). Previously, the functions +, -, *, /, conj, real and imag returned the unwrapped element when operating over zero-dimensional arrays. mod now accepts a unit range as the second argument to easily perform offset modular arithmetic to ensure the result is inside the range. Julia v1.3 also includes changes in other libraries including Libdl, LinearAlgebra, SparseArrays, Dates, Statistics, Sockets, and a few more. According to the team, @spawn expr from the Distributed standard library should be replaced with @spawnat :any expr. Also, Threads.Mutex and Threads.RecursiveSpinLock have been removed; developers suggest using ReentrantLock (preferred) or Threads.SpinLock instead. Another tooling improvement includes the ClangSA.jl static analysis package has been imported, which makes use of the clang static analyzer to validate GC invariants in Julia's C code. The analysis may be run using make -C src analyzegc. Users are excited to try out Julia v1.3. A user on Hacker News commented, “By far the most interesting part of this release is the new multi-threading features.” To know more about this news in detail, head over to Julia v1.3 release notes. The Julia team shares its finalized release process with the community Julia v1.2 releases with support for argument splatting, Unicode 12, new star unary operator, and more. Julia co-creator, Jeff Bezanson, on what’s wrong with Julialang and how to tackle issues like modularity and extension

Last week, the team behind Python announced the release of Python 3.8.0b1, which is the first out of the four planned beta release previews of Python 3.8. This release marks the beginning of the beta phase where you can test new features and make your applications ready for the new release. https://twitter.com/ThePSF/status/1137797764828553222 These are some of the features that you will see in the upcoming Python 3.8 version: Assignment expressions Assignment expressions were proposed in PEP 572, which was accepted after an extensive discussion among the Python developers. This feature introduces a new operator (:=) with which you will be able to assign variables within an expression. Positional-only arguments In Python, you can pass an argument to a function by position, keyword, or both. API designers may sometimes want to restrict passing the arguments by position only. To easily implement this, Python 3.8 will come with a new marker (/) to indicate that the arguments to its left are positional only. This is similar to * that indicates the arguments to its right are keyword only. Python Initialization Configuration Python is highly configurable, but the configurations are scattered all around the code. This version introduces new functions and structures to the Python Initialization C API to provide Python developers a “straightforward and reliable way” to configure Python. The Vectorcall protocol for CPython The calling convention impacts the flexibility and performance of your code considerably. To optimize the calling of objects, this release introduces Vectorcall protocol and a calling convention that is already being used internally for Python and built-in functions. Runtime audit hooks Python 3.8 will come with two new APIs: Audit Hook and Verified Open Hook to give you insights into a running Python application. These will facilitate both application developers and system administrators to integrate Python into their existing monitoring systems. As this is a beta release, developers should refrain from using it in production environments. The next beta release is currently planned to release on July 1st. To know more about Python 3.8.0b1, check out the official announcement. Which Python framework is best for building RESTful APIs? Django or Flask? PyCon 2019 highlights: Python Steering Council discusses the changes in the current Python governance structure Python 3.8 alpha 2 is now available for testing

Yesterday, GitLab, a San Francisco based start-up, raised $268 million in a Series E funding round valuing the company at $2.75 billion, more than double of its last valuation. In the Series D round funding of $100 million the company was valued at $1.1 billion; and with today’s announcement, the valuation has more than doubled in less than a year. GitLab provides a DevOps platform for developing and collaborating on code and offers a single application for companies to draft, develop and release code. The product is used by companies like Delta Air Lines Inc., Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc etc. The Series E funding round was led by investors including Adage Capital Management, Alkeon Capital, Altimeter Capital, Capital Group, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Franklin Templeton, Light Street Capital, Tiger Management Corp. and Two Sigma Investments. GitLab plans to go public in November 2020 According to Forbes, GitLab has already set November 18, 2020 as the date for going public. The company seems to be primed and ready for the eventual IPO. As for the $268 million, it gives the company considerable time ahead of the planned event and also gives the flexibility to choose how to take the company public. “One other consideration is that there are two options to go public. You can do an IPO or direct listing. We wanted to preserve the optionality of doing a direct listing next year. So if we do a direct listing, we’re not going to raise any additional money, and we wanted to make sure that this is enough in that case,” Sid Sijbrandij, Gitlab co-founder and CEO explained in an interview for TechCrunch. He further adds, that the new funds will be used to add monitoring and security to GitLab’s offering, and to increase the company’s staff to more than 1,000 employees this year from 400 employee strength currently. GitLab is able to add workers at a rapid rate, since it has an all-remote workforce. GitLab wants to be independent and chooses transparency for community Sijbrandij says that the company made a deliberate decision to be transparent early on. Being based on an open-source project, it’s sometimes tricky to make the transition to a commercial company, and sometimes that has a negative impact on the community and the number of contributions. Transparency was a way to combat that, and it seems to be working. He reports that the community contributes 200 improvements to the GitLab open-source products every month, and that’s double the amount of just a year ago, so the community is still highly active. He did not ignore the fact that Microsoft acquired GitHub last year for $7.5 billion. And GitLab is a similar kind of company that helps developers manage and distribute code in a DevOps environment. He claims in spite of that eye-popping number, his goal is to remain an independent company and take this through to the next phase. “Our ambition is to stay an independent company. And that’s why we put out the ambition early to become a listed company. That’s not totally in our control as the majority of the company is owned by investors, but as long as we’re more positive about the future than the people around us, I think we can we have a shot at not getting acquired,” he said. Community is happy with GitLab’s products and services Overall the community is happy with this news and GitLab’s products and services. One of the comments on Hacker News reads, “Congrats, GitLab team. Way to build an impressive business. When anybody tells you there are rules to venture capital — like it’s impossible to take on massive incumbents that have network effects — ignore them. The GitLab team is doing something phenomenal here. Enjoy your success! You’ve earned it.” Another user comments, “We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now. What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that. We are now a paying customer. Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and integrates really easily with AWS and GCP. Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer service I’ve experienced. Their product is feature rich, priced right and is easy. I’m amazed at how the operate. Kudos to the team” Other interesting news in programming Microsoft open-sources its C++ Standard Library (STL) used by MSVC tool-chain and Visual Studio Linux 5.3 releases with support for AMD Navi GPUs, Zhaoxin x86 CPUs and power usage improvements NVIM v0.4.0 releases with new API functions, Lua library, UI events and more!

Yesterday, the team behind OpenBSD, a Unix-like operating system, announced the release of OpenBSD 6.6. This release has GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) disabled in its base packages for i386 and ARMv7 and expanded LLVM Clang platform support. OpenBSD 6.6 also features various SMP improvements, improved Linux compatibility with ACPI interfaces, a number of new hardware drivers, and more. It ships with OpenSSH 8.1, LibreSSL 3.0.2, OpenSMTPD 6.6, and other updated packages. Read also: OpenSSH code gets an update to protect against side-channel attacks Key updates in OpenBSD 6.6 Unlocked system calls OpenBSD 6.6 comes with unlocked ‘getrlimit’ and ‘setrlimit’ system calls. These are used for controlling the maximum system resource consumption. There are also unlocked read and write system calls for reading input and writing output respectively. Improved hardware support OpenBSD 6.6 comes with Linux compatible ACPI interfaces. Also, the ACPI support is enabled in ‘radeon’ and ‘amdgpu’. Time Stamp Counter (TSC) is re-enabled as the default AMD64 time source and TSC synchronization is added for multiprocessor machines. This release supports the cryptographic coprocessor found on newer AMD Ryzen CPUs/APUs. IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements The ifconfig ‘nwflag’ is now repaired. A new stayauth ‘nwflag’ is added, which you can set to ignore deauth frames to prevent your system from a spoofing attack. Support for 802.11n Tx aggregation is added to net80211 and the ‘iwn’ driver. Starting with OpenBSD 6.6, all wireless drives submit a batch of received packets to the network stack during one interrupt, instead of submitting them individually. Security improvements The unveil command is updated to improve application behavior when encountering hidden filesystem paths. OpenBSD 6.6 has improved mitigations against a number of vulnerabilities including Spectre side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs and Intel's Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerability. This release introduces 'malloc_conceal' and 'calloc_conceal', which return the memory in pages marked ‘MAP_CONCEAL’ and call ‘freezero’ on ‘free’. Read also: Seven new Spectre and Meltdown attacks found In a discussion on Hacker News, many users expressed their excitement. A user commented, “Just keeps getting better and better every release. I wish they would add an easy encryption option in the installer. You can enable full-disk encryption, but you have to mess with the bioctl settings, which potentially scares off new users.” A few users also had some doubt that why this release has U2F support and Bluetooth disabled for security. A user explained, “I'm not sure why U2F would be "disabled for security". I guess it's just that nobody has implemented all the required things. For the USB tokens, you need userspace USB HID access and hotplug notifications. I did that in Firefox for FreeBSD.” These were some of the updates in OpenBSD 6.6. Check out the official announcement to know more. OpenBSD 6.4 released OpenSSH code gets an update to protect against side-channel attacks OpenSSH 8.0 released; addresses SCP vulnerability and new SSH additions  

.NET Core 2.0 was released mid August 2017. It has now reached end of life (EOL) and will no longer be supported by Microsoft. .NET Core 2.0 EOL .NET Core 2.1 was released towards the end of May 2018 and .NET Core 2.0 reached EOL on October 1. This was supposed to happen on September 1 but was pushed by a month since users experienced issues in upgrading to the newer version. .NET Core 2.1 is a long-term support (LTS) release and should be supported till at least August 2021. It is recommended to upgrade to and use .NET Core 2.1 for your projects. There are no major changes in the newer version. .NET Core 2.0 is no longer supported and updates won’t be provided. The installers, zips and Docker images of .NET Core 2.0 will still remain available, but they won’t be supported. Downloads for 2.0 will still be accessible via the Download Archives. However, .NET Core 2.0 is removed from the microsoft/dotnet repository README file. All the existing images will still be available in that repository. Microsoft’s support policy The ‘LTS’ releases contain stabilized features and components. They require fewer updates over their longer support release lifetime. The LTS releases are a good choice for applications that developers do not intend to update very often. The ‘current’ releases include features that are new and may undergo changes in the future based on feedback/issues. They give access to the latest features and improvements and hence are a good choice for applications in active development. Upgrades to newer .NET Core releases is required more frequently to stay in support. Some of the new features in .NET Core 2.1 include performance improvements, long term support, Brotli compression, and new cryptography APIs. To migrate from .NET Core 2.0 to .NET Core 2.1, visit the Microsoft website. You can read the official announcement on GitHub. Note: article amended 08.10.2018 - .NET Core 2.0 reached EOL on October 1, not .NET Core 2.1. The installers, zips and Docker images will still remain available but won't be supported, not unsupported. .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 Use App Metrics to analyze HTTP traffic, errors & network performance of a .NET Core app [Tutorial]

On December 9, WireGuard announced that its secure VPN tunnel kernel code will soon be included in Linux net-next tree. This indicates, “WireGuard will finally reach the mainline kernel with the Linux 5.6 cycle kicking off in late January or early February!”, reports Phoronix. WireGuard is a layer 3 secure networking tunnel made specifically for the kernel, that aims to be much simpler and easier to audit than IPsec. On December 8, Jason Donenfeld, WireGuard’s lead developer sent out patches for the net-next v2 WireGuard. “David Miller has already pulled in WireGuard as the first new feature in net-next that is destined for Linux 5.6 now that the 5.5 merge window is over,” the email thread mentions. While WireGuard was initiated as a Linux project, its Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, and Android versions are already available. The reason behind the delay for Linux was that Donenfeld disliked Linux’s built-in cryptographic subsystem citing its API is too complex and difficult. Donenfeld had plans to introduce a new cryptographic subsystem — his own Zinc library. However, this didn’t go down well with several developers as they thought that rewriting the cryptographic subsystem was a waste of time. Fortunately for Donenfeld, Linus Torvalds was on his side. Torvalds stated, “I’m 1000% with Jason on this. The crypto/model is hard to use, inefficient, and completely pointless when you know what your cipher or hash algorithm is, and your CPU just does it well directly.” Finally, Donenfeld compromised saying, "WireGuard will get ported to the existing crypto API. So it's probably better that we just fully embrace it, and afterward work evolutionarily to get Zinc into Linux piecemeal." Hence a few Zine elements have been imported into the legacy crypto code in the next Linux 5.5 kernel. WireGuard would become the new standard for Linux VPNs This laid the foundation for WireGuard to finally ship in Linux early next year. WireGuard works by securely encapsulates IP packets over UDP. It's authentication and interface design has more to do with Secure Shell (SSH) than other VPNs. You simply configure the WireGuard interface with your private key and your peers' public keys, and you're ready to securely talk. After the arrival, WireGuard VPN can be expected to become the new standard for Linux VPNs with its key features, namely, tiny code-size, high-speed cryptographic primitives, and in-kernel design. With being super-fast, WireGuard for Linux would be secure too as it supports state-of-the-art cryptography technologies such as the Noise protocol framework, Curve25519, BLAKE2, SipHash24, ChaCha20, Poly1305, and HKD. Donenfeld in the email thread writes, “This is big news and very exciting. Thanks to all the developers, contributors, users, advisers, and mailing list interlocutors who have helped to make this happen. In the coming hours and days, I'll be sending followups on next steps.” ArsTechnica reports, “Although highly speculative, it's also possible that WireGuard could land in-kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 even without the 5.6 kernel—WireGuard founder Jason Donenfeld offered to do the work backporting WireGuard into earlier Ubuntu kernels directly. Donenfeld also stated today that a 1.0 WireGuard release is ‘on the horizon’." To know more about this news in detail, read the official email thread. WireGuard launches an official MacOS app Researchers find a new Linux vulnerability that allows attackers to sniff or hijack VPN connections. NCSC investigates several vulnerabilities in VPN products from Pulse secure, Palo Alto and Fortinet

The attempts of porting Swift to WebAssembly has been going on for very long, and finally, a team of developers has come up with SwiftWasm, which was released last week. With this tool, you will now be able to run your Swift code on the web by compiling it to WebAseembly. https://twitter.com/swiftwasm/status/1127324144121536512 The SwiftWasm tool is built on top of the WASI SDK, which is a WASI-enabled C/C++ toolchain. This makes the WebAssembly executables generated by SwiftWasm work on both browsers and standalone WebAssembly runtimes such as Wasmtime, Fastly’s Lucet, or any other WASI-compatible WebAssembly runtime. How you can work with SwiftWasm? While macOS does not need any dependencies to be installed, some dependencies need to be installed on Ubuntu and Windows: On Ubuntu install ‘libatomic1’: sudo apt-get install libatomic1 On Windows: First Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and then install the libatomic1 library. The next step is to compile SwiftWasm by running the following commands: ./swiftwasm example/hello.swift hello.wasm To run the resulting ‘hello.wasm’ file, go to the SwiftWasm polyfill and upload the file. You will see the output in the textbox. This polyfill supports Firefox 66, Chrome 74, and Safari 12.1. The news of having a tool for running Swift on the web has got many developers excited. https://twitter.com/pvieito/status/1127620197668487169 https://twitter.com/johannesweiss/status/1126913408455053312 https://twitter.com/jedisct1/status/1126909145926569986 The project is still work-in-progress and thus has some limitations. Currently, only the Swift ‘stdlib’ is compiled and other libraries such as Foundation or SwiftPM are not included. Few functions such as ‘Optional.Map’ does not work because of the calling convention differences between throwing and non-throwing closures. If you want to contribute to this project, check out its pull request on Swift’s GitHub repository to know more about its current status. You can try SwiftWasm on its official website. Swift is improving the UI of its generics model with the “reverse generics” system Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 is here! Implementing Dependency Injection in Swift [Tutorial]

Java 5 brought generics to the Java language. In this article, I introduce you to generics and discuss generic types, generic methods, generics and type inference, generics controversy, and generics and heap pollution. download Get the code Download the source code for examples in this Java 101 tutorial. Created by Jeff Friesen for JavaWorld. What are generics? Generics are a collection of related language features that allow types or methods to operate on objects of various types while providing compile-time type safety. Generics features address the problem of java.lang.ClassCastExceptions being thrown at runtime, which are the result of code that is not type safe (i.e., casting objects from their current types to incompatible types). To read this article in full, please click here

On Tuesday, Racket, a general-purpose programming language announced Racket 7.5. Racket is based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp programming language and is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. Racket is also used to refer to the family of Racket programming languages and the set of tools supporting development on and with Racket. Key features in Racket 7.5 This new release will be distributed under a new and less-restrictive license, either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license Racket CS will remain in beta for the v7.5, but the compatibility and performance continue to improve. It is expected to be ready for production use by the next release In this release of Racket 7.5 the Web Server provides a standard JSON MIME type, including a response/jsexpr form for HTTP responses bearing JSON In this release GNU MPFR operations run about 3x faster Typed Racket supports definitions of new struct type properties and type checks uses existing struct type properties in struct definitions. Previously, these were ignored by the type checker, so type errors may have been hidden The performance bug in v7.4’s big bang has been repaired DrRacket supports Dark Mode for interface elements. With this release plot can display parametric 3d surfaces and redex supports modeless judgment forms Additionally with the above changes, in the Racket 7.5 MacOS Catalina 10.15 includes a new requirement that executables be “notarized”, to give Apple the ability to prevent certain kinds of malware. In this release, all of the disk images (.dmg’s) are notarized, along with the applications that they contain (.app’s). Many users may not notice any difference, but two groups of Catalina users will be affected; First those who use the “racket” binary directly, and second, those that download the .tgz bundles. In both cases, the operating system is likely to inform that the given executable is not trusted, or that the developer can’t be verified. Fortunately, both groups of users are probably also running commands in a shell, hence the solution for both groups will be the same that is to disable the quarantine flag using the xattr command, for example, xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/racket. To know more about this news, check out the official announcement on the Racket page. Matthew Flatt’s proposal to change Racket’s s-expressions based syntax to infix representation creates a stir in the community Racket 7.3 releases with improved Racket-on-Chez, refactored IO system, and more Racket 7.2, a descendent of Scheme and Lisp, is now out! Racket v7.0 is out with overhauled internals, updates to DrRacket, TypedRacket among others  

“Security, customizability, flexibility and cost are a few of the benefits of open-source software for developers. They’ll get all these and more from NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language software development kit.” —NVIDIA Blog. The material definition language (MDL) is a programming language used to define and render physical materials. This includes the creation of a wide range of physical materials such as woods, fabrics, translucent plastics and more. It is a set of tools integrating the precise look and feel of real-world materials into rendering applications. It gives users the freedom to share these materials between applications that support them. Now users can move a library of these materials between applications without worrying about them losing their appearance. This will allow developers to focus on building their applications. Allegorithmic had already built an entire MDL authoring tool, but with NVIDIA making the MDL SDK open source, developers get a deeper unrestricted access to the entire spec. The Blog states that Unreal Studio 4.20 now offers native support for MDL. “Being able to use a single material definition, like NVIDIA’s MDL, across multiple applications and render engines is a huge benefit to the end-user,” said Ken Pimentel, senior product manager of the Enterprise team at Epic Games. “Now that we’ve added MDL support to Unreal Studio, our enterprise customers can see their material representations converted to real time in Unreal Engine without baking every parameter. This means their creative intent can be carried to new forms of expression.” The MDL SDK API is C++ based and used for integration and customization tasks. It can be loaded dynamically and linked to visualization applications. The API also allows applications to load MDL modules, and analyze and understand the structure of a material. Therefore it can build a UI for editing materials then rendering the results. Some of the features in MDL SDK include: Can be used on GPU as well as CPU Database view on the imported MDL package space MDL editing C++ component-based API, and plugin architecture for extensibility MDL SDK supports Windows (only 64-bit), Linux, and macOS. To know more, visit the NVIDIA website and to get started here is the GitHub repository. Nvidia unveils a new Turing architecture: “The world’s first ray tracing GPU” Nvidia and AI researchers create AI agent Noise2Noise that can denoise images Nvidia GPUs offer Kubernetes for accelerated deployments of Artificial Intelligence workloads