Tech News - Programming

Last week the team at Electron announced the release of Electron 7.0 in beta. It includes upgrades to Chromium 78, V8 7.8, and Node.js 12.8.1. The team has added a Window on Arm 64 release, faster IPC methods, a new nativeTheme API, and much more. This release is published to npm under the beta tag and can be installed via npm install electron@beta, or npm i electron@7.0.0-beta.7. It is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. Notable changes in Electron 7.0 There are stack upgrades in this release, Electron 7.0 will be compatible on Chromium 78, V8 7.8 and Node.js 12.8.1. In this release they have added Windows on Arm (64 bit). The team has added ipcRenderer.invoke() and ipcMain.handle() for asynchronous request/response-style IPC. These are strongly recommended over the remote module. They have added nativeTheme API to read and respond to changes in the OS's theme and color scheme. In this release they have switched to a new TypeScript Definitions generator, which generates more precise definitions files (d.ts) from C# model classes to build strongly typed web application where the server- and client-side models are in sync. Earlier Electron used Doc Linter and Doc Parser but it had a few issues and hence shifted to TypeScript to make definition files better without losing any information on docs. Other breaking changes The team has removed deprecated APIs in this release: Callback-based versions of functions that now use Promises. Tray.setHighlightMode() (macOS). app.enableMixedSandbox() app.getApplicationMenu(), app.setApplicationMenu(), powerMonitor.querySystemIdleState(), powerMonitor.querySystemIdleTime(), webFrame.setIsolatedWorldContentSecurityPolicy(), webFrame.setIsolatedWorldHumanReadableName(), webFrame.setIsolatedWorldSecurityOrigin() Session.clearAuthCache() no longer allows filtering the cleared cache entries. Native interfaces on macOS (menus, dialogs, etc.) now automatically match the dark mode setting on the user's machine. The team has updated the electron module to use @electron/get. Node 8 is the minimum supported node version in this release. The electron.asar file no longer exists. Any packaging scripts that depend on its existence should be updated by the developers. Additionally the team announced that Electron 4.x.y has reached end-of-support as per the project's support policy. Developers and applications are encouraged to upgrade to a newer version of Electron. To know more about this release, check out the Electron 7.0 GitHub page and the official blog post. Electron 6.0 releases with improved Promise support, native Touch ID authentication support, and more Electron 5.0 ships with new versions of Chromium, V8, and Node.js The Electron team publicly shares the release timeline for Electron 5.0

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new static type checker for Python called Pyright to fill in the gaps in existing Python type checkers like mypy. Currently, this type checker supports Python 3.0 and its newer versions. What are the type checking features Pyright brings in? It comes with support for PEP 484 (type hints including generics), PEP 526 (syntax for variable annotations), and PEP 544 (structural subtyping). It supports type inference for function return values, instance variables, class variables, and globals. It provides smart type constraints that can understand conditional code flow constructs like if/else statements. Increased speed Pyright shows 5x speed as compared to mypy and other existing type checkers written in Python. It was built keeping large source bases in mind and can perform incremental updates when files are modified. No need for setting up a Python Environment Since Pyright is written in TypeScript and runs within Node, you do not need to set up a Python environment or import third-party packages for installation. This proves really helpful when using the VS Code editor, which has Node as its extension runtime. Flexible configurability Pyright enables users to have granular control over settings. You can specify different execution environments for different subsets of a source base. For each environment, you can specify different PYTHONPATH settings, Python version, and platform target. To know more in detail about Pyright, check out its GitHub repository. Debugging and Profiling Python Scripts [Tutorial] Python 3.8 alpha 2 is now available for testing Core CPython developer unveils a new project that can analyze his phone’s ‘silent connections’  

On Tuesday, the team behind Electron, the web framework for building desktop apps, announced the release of Electron 6.0. It comes with further improvement in the ‘Promise’ support, native Touch ID authentication support for macOS, native emoji and color picker methods, and more. This release is upgraded to Chrome 76, Node.js 12.4.0, and V8 7.6. https://twitter.com/electronjs/status/1156273653635407872 Promisification of functions continue Starting from Electron 5.0, the team introduced a process called “promisification” in which callback-based functions are converted to return ‘Promises’. In Electron 6.0, the team has converted 26 functions to return Promises and also supported callback-based invocation. Among these “promisified” functions are ‘contentTracing.getCategories()’, ‘cookies.flushStore()’, ‘dialog.showCertificateTrustDialog()’, and more. Three new variants of the Helper app The hardened runtime was introduced to prevent exploits like code injection, DLL hijacking, and process memory space tampering. However, to serve the purpose it does restricts things like writable-executable memory and loading code signed by a different Team ID.  If your app relies on such functionalities, you can add an entitlement to disable individual protection. To enable a hardened runtime in an Electron app, special code signing entitlements were granted to Electron Helper. Starting from Electron 6.0, three new variants of the Helper app are added to keep these granted entitlements scoped to the process types that require them. These are ‘Electron Helper (Renderer).app)’, ‘(Electron Helper (GPU).app)’, and ‘(Electron Helper (Plugin).app)’. Developers using ‘electron-osx-sign’ to codesign their Electron app, do not have to make any changes to their build logic. But if you are using custom scripts instead, then you will need to ensure that the three Helper apps are correctly codesigned. To correctly package your application with these new helpers, use ‘electron-packager@14.0.4’ or higher. Miscellaneous changes to Electron 6.0 Electron 6.0 brings native Touch ID authentication support for macOS. There are now native emoji and color picker methods for Windows and macOS. The ‘chrome.runtime.getManifest’ API for Chrome extensions is added that returns details about the app or extension from the manifest. The ‘<webview>.getWebContentsId()’ method is added that allows getting the WebContents ID of WebViews when the remote module is disabled. Support is added for the Chrome extension content script option ‘all_frames’. This option allows an extension to specify whether JS and CSS files should be injected into all frames or only into the topmost frame in a tab. With Electron 6.0, the team has laid out the groundwork for a future requirement, which says that all native Node modules loaded in the renderer process will be either N-API or Context Aware. This is done for faster performance, better security, and reduced maintenance workload. Along with the release announcement, the team also announced the end of life of Electron 3.x.y and has recommended upgrading to a newer version of Electron. To know all the new features in Electron 6.0, check out the official announcement. Electron 5.0 ships with new versions of Chromium, V8, and Node.js The Electron team publicly shares the release timeline for Electron 5.0 How to create a desktop application with Electron [Tutorial]

Two days ago, Immo Landwerth, a program manager on the .NET team announced that the community is concluding the .NET Framework API Porting project. They also plan to release more of the .NET Framework codebase under the MIT license on GitHub to allow the community to create OSS projects for technologies that will not be brought to .NET Core. For example, there already are community projects for CoreWF and CoreWCF. https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/1184214679779864576 In May, this year, Microsoft announced that the future of .NET will be based on .NET Core. At Build 2019, Scott Hunter stated that AppDomains, remoting, Web Forms, WCF server, and Windows Workflow won’t be ported to .NET Core. “With .NET Core 3.0, we’re at the point where we’ve ported all technologies that are required for modern workloads, be it desktop apps, mobile apps, console apps, web sites, or cloud services,” Landwerth writes. .NET Core 3.0 released last month includes added WPF and WinForms, which increased the number of .NET Framework APIs ported to .NET Core to over 120k, which is more than half of all .NET Framework APIs. Also, about 62K APIs to .NET Core that doesn’t exist in the .NET Framework. On comparing the total number of APIs, .NET Core has about 80% of the API surface of .NET Framework. “Since we generally no longer plan to bring existing technologies from .NET Framework to .NET Core we’ll be closing all issues that are labeled with port-to-core,” Landwerth further mentions. Post this announcement on GitHub, a lot of GitHub users enquired more about this change in the .NET community. A user asked, “Is CSharpCodeProvider ever going to happen in Core? The CodeDom API arrived somewhere in the 2.x timeframe, but it's a runtime fail even under 3.0 - are we going to need to re-write for some kind of explicitly Roslyn scripting?” To this, Landwerth replied, “CSharpCodeProvider is supported on .NET Core, but only the portions that deal with CodeDOM creation. You can't compile because this would require a compiler and the .NET Core runtime doesn't include a compiler (i.e. Roslyn). However, we might be able to do some gymnastics, like reflection, where the app can pull that in. Still tracked under #12180.” https://twitter.com/terrajobst/status/1183832593197744129 To know more about this announcement in detail, read the official GitHub post. .NET 5 arriving in 2020! Docker announces collaboration with Microsoft’s .NET at DockerCon 2019 .NET Core 3.0 is now available with C# 8, F# 4.7, ASP.NET Core 3.0 and EF 6.3

Did you know Ionic and Angular power roughly 10% of the apps on iOS and almost 20% of apps on Android? Let’s repeat that: Angular powers a significant chunk of apps in the app stores. Why is it helpful to know this? Well, if you were on the fence about what technology choice you should make for your next app, it should be reassuring to know that apps powered by web technology are thriving in the app store. Let’s explore how we came to that conclusion and why it matters. First, for a number of reasons, users visit these stores and download apps that help them in their day-to-day lives. Users are searching for ToDo apps (who doesn’t love a good ToDo app), banking apps, work-specific apps and so much more. A good portion of these apps are built using web technologies such as Ionic and Angular. But enough talk, let’s look at some numbers to back this up. The Data If you’ve never heard of Appfigures, it’s an analytics tool that monitors and offers insights on more than 150,000 apps. Appfigures provides some great insight into what kind of tools developers are using to build their apps. Like what’s the latest messaging, mapping, or development SDK? That last one is the most important metric we want to explore. Let’s look at what the top development SDKs are for app development: Data from https://appfigures.com/top-sdks/development/apps Woah, roughly 10% of the apps on iOS and almost 20% of apps on Android use Ionic and Angular. This is huge. The data here is gathered by analyzing the various SDKs used in apps on the app stores. In these charts we see some options that are to be expected like Swift and Kotlin. But Ionic and Angular are still highly present. We could even include Cordova, since many Ionic apps are Cordova-based, and these stats would increase even more. But we’ll keep to the data that we know for sure. Given the number of apps out there, even 10% and 20% are a significant size. If you ignore Appfigures, you can get a sense of how many Ionic/Angular apps are there by just searching for “com.ionicframework”, which is our starting package ID (also, people should really change this). Here’s a link if you’re interested. Why Angular for mobile? Developers are using Ionic and Angular power a good chunk of the app stores. With everything Angular has to offer in terms of developer experience, tooling for fast apps, and its ecosystem of third-party libraries (like Ionic), it’s no wonder developers choose it as their framework of choice. From solo devs, to small shops, to large organizations like the UK’s National Health Service, Boehringer Ingelheim and BlueCross Blue Shield, these organizations have selected Angular and Ionic for their tech stack, and you should feel confident to do so as well. Web vs. App Stores If Ionic and Angular are based on web technologies, why even target the app stores at all? With Progressive Web Apps gaining traction and the web becoming a more capable platform, why not just deploy to the web and skip the app stores? Well it turns out that the app stores provide a lot of value that products need. Features like Push Notifications, File System API, etc are starting to come to the web, but they are still not fully available in every browser. Building a hybrid app with Ionic and Angular can allow developers to use these features and gracefully fallback when these APIs are not available. Discoverability is also another big factor here. While we can search for anything on the web, having users discover your app can be challenging. With the app stores they regularly promote new apps and highly rated apps as well. This can make the difference between a successful product and one that fails. The Best of Both Worlds The web is still an important step to shipping a great app. But when developers want to target different platforms, having the right libraries in place can make all the difference. For instance, if you want to build a fast and performant web app, Angular is an excellent choice and is statistically the choice many developers make. On the other hand, if you want to bring that app experience to a mobile device, with full access to every native feature and offline capabilities, then a hybrid mobile app using Angular plus a mobile SDK like Ionic is the way to go. Either way, your investment in Angular will serve you well. And you’ll be in good company, with millions of devs and nearly a million apps right alongside you. Ionic + Angular: Powering the App store and the web was originally published in Angular Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oracle has announced a major shift in the pricing structure for various offerings of Java. Currently, there are many offerings for the core Java language in terms of Java binaries, Java for desktops, commercial offering, among others. Java binaries are offered free for developers under the General Public License 2 (GPL 2). Java SE is offered, at an entry-level support, for $2.50/desktop for a month, or $25/CPU for a month. Under the free offering for developers, Oracle will provide OpenJDK builds (the backend that keeps Java running on any system) under the GPL + CPE license. To make the offering more flexible, Oracle is working on Oracle JDK which would support Java SE 11 (the LTS release) set to launch in September 2018. With Oracle JDK, Oracle is trying to make the offering of Java binaries simpler for the developers as it would be royalty-free for open-source development, testing, etc. For the commercial license, Oracle will be offering the Java SE Subscriptions combined with the technical support and access to all the updates that will follow the Java SE release cycle. Apart from the commercial offering, Oracle also has varied pricing for offerings through Oracle Academy. With the new Java SE Subscription, comes with a feature called Java Advanced Management Console. This feature will enable the license holders to identify, manage, and tune Java SE use in systems used across the enterprise. It also includes Oracle Premier Support, to enable support for Java across current and previous versions. Oracle, in their press release, mentioned the update in the subscription model is inspired by how Linux provides support for updates in the platform. It mentions "the subscription model for updates and support has been long established in the Linux ecosystem". By this new subscription model, Oracle ensures that anyone requiring the additional level of support for Oracle products can receive it with flexible pricing and still keep a balance between its open source and commercial offerings. For all the details on these subscriptions, you can visit the Java SE subscription FAQs. Oracle reveals issues in Object Serialization. Plans to drop it from core Java. 5 Things you need to know about Java 10 Oracle Apex 18.1 is here!

Two months ago, ASP.NET Core 3.0 was released with an updated version of the Blazor framework. This framework allows the building of interactive client-side web UI with .NET. Yesterday, Peter Huene, a staff research engineer at Mozilla shared his experience of using Wasmtime with .NET. He affirms that using this format will enable developers to programmatically load and execute WebAssembly code directly from their .NET programs. Key benefits of using WebAssembly from .NET with Wasmtime Share more code across platforms Although .NET Core enables cross-platform use, developers find it difficult to use a native library as .Net Core requires native interop and a platform-specific build for each supported platform. However, if the native library is compiled to WebAssembly, then the same WebAssembly module can be used across many different platforms and programming environments, including .NET. Thus a more simplified distribution of the library and applications will allow developers to share more codes across platforms. Securely isolate untrusted code According to Huene, “The .NET Framework attempted to sandbox untrusted code with technologies such as Code Access Security and Application Domains, but ultimately these failed to properly isolate untrusted code.” This resulted in Microsoft deprecating its use for sandboxing and removing it from .NET Core. Huene asserts that since WebAssembly is designed for the web, its module will enable users to call the external explicitly imported function from a host environment and will also give access to only a region of memory given to it by the host. With WebAssembly, users can also leverage this design to sandbox code in a .NET program. Improved interoperability with interface types In August this year, WebAssembly’s interface types permitted users to run WebAssembly with many programming languages like Python, Ruby, and Rust. This interoperability reduced the amount of glue code which was necessary for passing complex types between the hosting application and a WebAssembly module. According to Huene, if Wasmtime implements official support for interface types for .NET API in the future, it will enable a seamless exchange of complex types between WebAssembly and .NET. Users have liked the approach of using WebAssembly from .NET with Wasmtime. https://twitter.com/mattferderer/status/1202276545840197633 https://twitter.com/seangwright/status/1202488332011347968 To know how Peter Huene used WebAssembly from .NET, check out his demonstrations on the Mozilla Hacks blog. Exploring .Net Core 3.0 components with Mark J. Price, a Microsoft specialist .NET Framework API Porting Project concludes with .NET Core 3.0 Wasmer’s first Postgres extension to run WebAssembly is here! Wasmer introduces WebAssembly Interfaces for validating the imports and exports of a Wasm module Introducing SwiftWasm, a tool for compiling Swift to WebAssembly

Yesterday, at the Microsoft Build 2019, the team at Microsoft announced Windows Terminal, a new terminal application for users of command-line tools and shells like PowerShell, Command Prompt, and WSL. This terminal will be delivered via the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 and will be regularly updated. Key features of Windows Terminal Multiple tabs Windows Terminal comes with multiple tab support so users will now be able to open any number of tabs, each connected to a command-line shell or app of their choice. E.g. PowerShell, Ubuntu on WSL, Command Prompt, a Raspberry Pi via SSH, etc. Text Windows terminal uses a GPU accelerated DirectWrite/DirectX-based text rendering engine so that it displays text characters, glyphs, and symbols present within fonts on the PC. In addition, it also includes emoji, powerline symbols, CJK ideograms, icons, programming ligatures, etc. It can also render text much faster as compared to the previously used engines. Users now have the option of using their own new font. Settings and configurability Windows Terminal comes with many settings and configuration options that manage Terminal’s appearance and each of the shells/profiles that users open as new tabs. The settings are stored in a structured text file so that it makes it easy for users and/or tools to configure. With the terminal’s configuration mechanism, users will be able to create multiple “profiles” for each shell/app/tool. And these profiles can have their own combination of color themes, font styles and sizes, background blur/transparency levels, etc so that users can now create their own custom-styled Terminal. Windows Console The team further announced that they are open sourcing Windows Console which hosts the command-line infrastructure in Windows and provides the traditional Console UX. The primary goal of the console is preserving backward compatibility with existing command-line tools, scripts, etc. 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    

As any JavaScript framework community grows, it becomes difficult to navigate which avenues developers have to look for solutions to problems they have encountered. FeathersJS has continually been at the forefront of JavaScript discussions since its inception, as illustrated in the annual State of JS survey. We created FeathersJS Resources as a hub, or rather a starting point, to assist people in the Feathers community find what they may be searching for. There are many resource lists available, however, we noticed a lacking of curated examples. Our goal with this list is to provide an up-to-date account of which libraries are maintained, projects are active, and examples of FeathersJS in the wild. Our general rules for curation are as follows: projects on npm must have been published in the past two years; projects on GitHub must have been updated in the past two years; projects should be well documented; articles and tutorials should be topical to the FeathersJS community; examples should use FeathersJS as a part of their stack; support channels should be qualified by the FeathersJS core team. Not to overestimate our abilities to keep track of all projects in the ecosystem, we have a channel for people to submit projects for review, which can be added to the Feathers Resources site. With the above criteria, we have broken the list into several categories which will certainly be expanded as time goes on. A few notable examples from each category are: Articles and Tutorials How we debug Feathers APIs using Postman Author Juan Orozco details a general process, conventions, and steps on how Aquil.io uses Postman to develop and debug APIs with Feathers. A few gotchas are elaborated and patterns on how Aquil.io rapidly develops APIs are explained. Read article Build a CRUD App Using React, Redux and FeathersJS Author Michael Wanyoike takes readers through getting a contact manager application set up with Feathers, Create React App, and MongoDB. The benefits of following conventions in REST and a bit of Feathers background is explained with a concrete example. Read article Tools feathers-hooks-common feathers-hooks-common is a suite of hooks allowing developers to architect common processes in a composable fashion. Readable hook flows are created such as: iff(isProvider('external'), disallow()). Learn more feathers-sync feathers-sync allows for scaling Feathers APIs and keeping socket events in sync through an intermediary data source, such as Redis. With this project, a modifying request, such as a POST, may ping a single server while the {service}::created event will be relayed to all other servers in the cluster and their corresponding subscribers. Learn more Support Feathers Slack channel The official channel for FeathersJS discussions. Open to the public and staffed by the core team. The core maintainer and author, David Luecke, is typically available to answer in depth questions regarding the usage of Feathers. Slack channel Office hours Members of the FeathersJS core team and experts at Aquil.io are available for questions that may require a call or a screen share to debug or discuss issues the community is facing. Developers at Aquil.io have been power users of Feathers since 2014 and have experience in many of the nuances in real-world settings. Visit aquil.io Our hope is this list provides a bit of direction, if you are new to the community, and a place to quickly find support if you need it. The above is a sample, but be sure to read the full list at feathersresources.dev. If you want to check out what I’m working on or have web development needs, visit Aquil.io. Originally published at https://aquil.io on September 28, 2020. Tools, projects, and examples for FeathersJS developers in 2020 was originally published in DailyJS on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week, the CEO and CXO of elementary OS, Cassidy James Blaede announced the release of elementary OS 5.1, code named ‘Hera’. elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution, which promises to be a “fast, open, and privacy-respecting” replacement to macOS and Windows.  Building upon the solid foundations laid out by its predecessor Juno, Hera brings several new features including native support for Flatpak, a faster AppCentre storefront, accessibility features, among other updates. Key updates in elementary OS 5.1 Hera Brand new greeter and onboarding In elementary OS 5.1 Hera, the greeter and onboarding have seen major changes in order to give users an improved first-run experience. In addition to looking better, the redesigned greeter addresses some of the key reported issues including keyboard focus issues, HiDPI issues, and better localization. Hera also ships with a new Onboarding app that gives you a quick introduction to key features and also takes care of common first-run tasks like managing privacy settings. Native Flatpak support and AppCenter updates elementary OS 5.1 Hera comes with native support for Flatpack, an application sandboxing and distribution framework. It enables developers to create one application and distribute it to different Linux desktop distributions.  Hera includes a new core elementary OS utility called Sideload that allows users to sideload Flatpak apps. Any updates to the sideloaded apps will appear in AppCenter and apps from any user-added Flatpak remotes will show up in AppCenter as uncurated apps. Along with the Flatpak support, Blaede shared that it is now “up to 10× faster in Hera, loading the homepage and featured apps blazingly fast.” Accessibility improvements A bunch of accessibility features has landed in elementary OS 5.1 Hera. System Settings are now more accessible to all users. Discoverability of performance and keyboard shortcut has been improved. Sound settings has a new approach to handling external devices and there is a “Flash screen” option for event alerts to better manage whether alerts are audible, visual, both, or neither. The Mouse & Touchpad settings in elementary OS 5.1 Hera are now organized into sections based on different behavior. Several accessibility settings like long-press secondary click, reveal pointer, double-click speed, and control pointer using keypad have been exposed. Also, the touchpad settings now has an “Ignore when mouse is connected” toggle. Many developers have already started trying out this release. A Hacker News user shared their first impressions on a discussion regarding this release, “I installed this on my XPS 13 this morning, and it's really nice. It has a lot of overall polish that most DE's are missing, it looks and feels cohesive. It installed without any issues, and I had no problem with my Ubuntu-leaning dotfiles. I will probably keep this for the near future, it's very pleasant.” These were some of the updates in elementary OS 5.1 Hera. Check out the official announcement to know more about this release. Redox OS will soon permanently run rustc, the compiler for the Rust programming language, says Redox creator Jeremy Soller Nate Chamberlain talks about the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security suite and becoming M365 certified Microsoft technology evangelist Matthew Weston on how Microsoft PowerApps is democratizing app development [Interview]

Yesterday, the Rust team announced the release of Rust 1.35.0. This release highlights the implementation of Fn* closure traits for Box<dyn Fn*>. Additionally it has features like coercing closures which are extended to unsafe fn pointers, dbg! macro can now be called without passing any arguments, a number of APIs have become stable and many more. Key features explained in brief: Fn* closure traits implemented for Box<dyn Fn*> In Rust 1.35.0, the FnOnce, FnMut, and the Fn traits are now implemented for Box<dyn FnOnce>, Box<dyn FnMut>, and Box<dyn Fn> respectively. This allows users to use boxed functions in places where a function is to be implemented. It is also now possible to directly call Box<dyn FnOnce> objects. Coercing closures to unsafe function pointers In the earlier versions, it was possible to coerce closures which do not capture from the environment, into function pointers only . With this release, coercing closures has been extended to ‘unsafe’ function pointers also. Calling dbg!() with no argument ‘dbg!()’ macro allows to quickly inspect the value of some expression with context. Now, users can call dbg!() without passing any arguments. This is useful in tracing what branch your application will take. Library stabilizations In 1.35.0, a number of APIs have become stable. Few new implementations and other changes have also been made. Some are mentioned below: Copy the sign of a floating point number onto another Check whether a Range contains a value Map and split a borrowed RefCell value in two Replace the value of a RefCell through a closure Hash a pointer or reference by address, not value Copy the contents of an Option<&T> To know more about the changes in Library, head over to the release notes page. Changes in Clippy Clippy is a collection of lints to catch common mistakes and improve the Rust code. In this release of Rust, a new lint ‘drop_bounds’ has been added. Also Clippy has split the lintredundant_closure into redundant_closure and redundant_closure_for_method_calls. Changes in Cargo When passing a test filter, such as ‘cargo test foo’, the user does not have to build examples (unless they set test = true). ‘rustc-cdylib-link-arg’ key has been added to build scripts to specify linker arguments for cdylib crates. ‘Cargo clippy-preview’ is now a built-in cargo command. The verification step in ‘cargo package’ that checks if any files are modified is now stricter. It uses a hash of the contents instead of checking file system mtimes. It also checks all files in the package. To know more about the changes in Cargo, head over to the release notes page. Read more about the Rust 1.35.0 announcement on the official Rust blog. Read More Rust’s recent releases 1.34.0 and 1.34.1 affected from a vulnerability that can cause memory unsafety Rust 1.34 releases with alternative cargo registries, stabilized TryFrom and TryInto, and more Rust shares roadmap for 2019

Yesterday, Fastly, a US-based cloud computing service provider, open-sourced its native WebAssembly compiler and runtime, Lucet. Lucet is built on top of Cranelift, Mozilla’s low-level retargetable code generator. It already powers Fastly’s Terrarium project, their experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly, and now it is coming to their edge cloud platform as well. How does Lucet work? Lucet delegates the responsibility of executing WebAssembly programs into two components: compiler and runtime. The compiler compiles WebAssembly modules to native code and the runtime manages resources and traps runtime faults. As it uses ahead-of-time compilation strategy, it simplifies the design and overhead of the runtime compared to just-in-time (JIT) compilation that browser engines use. What are its advantages? Faster and safer execution of WebAssembly programs WebAssembly allows web browsers to safely execute programs with near-native performance. It is supported by some of the most commonly used browsers including Google, Mozilla, and Safari. With Lucet, Fastly aims to take WebAssembly “beyond the browser” by providing users a platform for faster and safer execution of programs on Fastly’s edge cloud. More languages to choose from Since WebAssembly is supported by an impressive list of programming languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, Lucet users will be able to work with the language they prefer. They do not have to be restricted to Fastly’s Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Simultaneous execution of programs The Lucet compiler and runtime ensure that each WebAssembly program is allocated its own resources. This enables Fastly’s edge cloud to simultaneously execute a large number of WebAssembly programs without compromising on security. Supports WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Lucet supports WASI, an API that provides access to various operating-system-like features. These include files and filesystems, Berkeley sockets, clocks, and random numbers. At the moment, Lucet supports running WebAssembly programs written in C, Rust, and AssemblyScript and its runtime only support x86-64 based Linux systems. To read the official announcement, visit Fastly’s official website. Introducing CT-Wasm, a type-driven extension to WebAssembly for secure, in-browser cryptography Creating and loading a WebAssembly module with Emscripten’s glue code [Tutorial] The elements of WebAssembly – Wat and Wasm, explained [Tutorial]

I just shipped version 4.1 of MikroORM, the TypeScript ORM for Node.js, and I feel like this particular release deserves a bit more attention than a regular feature release. In case you don’t know… If you never heard of MikroORM, it’s a TypeScript data-mapper ORM with Unit of Work and Identity Map. It supports MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite drivers currently. Key features of the ORM are: Implicit transactions ChangeSet based persistence Identity map You can read the full introductory article here or browse through the docs. So what changed? This release had only one clear goal in mind — the performance. It all started with an issue pointing out that flushing 10k entities in a single unit of work is very slow. While this kind of use case was never a target for me, I started to see all the possibilities the Unit of Work pattern offers. Batch inserts, updates and deletes The biggest performance killer was the amount of queries — even if the query is as simple and optimised as possible, firing 10k of those will be always quite slow. For inserts and deletes, it was quite trivial to group all the queries. A bit more challenging were the updates — to batch those, MikroORM now uses case statements. As a result, when you now flush changes made to one entity type, only one query per given operation (create/update/delete) will be executed. This brings significant difference, as we are now executing fixed number of queries (in fact the changes are batched in chunks of 300 items). https://medium.com/media/3df9aaa8c2f0cf018855bf66ecf3d065/href JIT compilation Second important change in 4.1 is JIT compilation. Under the hood, MikroORM now first generates simple functions for comparing and hydrating entities, that are tailored to their metadata definition. The main difference is that those generated functions are accessing the object properties directly (e.g. o.name), instead of dynamically (e.g. o[prop.name]), as all the information from metadata are inlined there. This allows V8 to better understand the code so it is able to run it faster. Results Here are the results for a simple 10k entities benchmark: In average, inserting 10k entities takes around 70ms with sqlite, updates are a tiny bit slower. You can see results for other drivers here: https://github.com/mikro-orm/benchmark. Acknowledgement Kudos to Marc J. Schmidt, the author of the initial issue, as without his help this would probably never happen, or at least not in near future. Thanks a lot! Like MikroORM? ⭐️ Star it on GitHub and share this article with your friends. If you want to support the project financially, you can do so via GitHub Sponsors. MikroORM 4.1: Let’s talk about performance was originally published in DailyJS on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday, Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 19.10 which is the fastest Ubuntu release with significant performance improvements to accelerate developer productivity in AI/ML. This release brings enhanced edge computing capabilities with the addition of strict confinement to MicroK8s, which will safeguard the complete isolation and presents a secured production-grade Kubernetes environment. This allows MicroK8s add-ons like Istio, Knative, CoreDNS, Prometheus, and Jaeger to be deployed securely at the edge with a single command. Ubuntu 19.10 also delivers other features like NVIDIA drivers which are embedded in the ISO image to improve the performance of gamers and AI/ML users. The CEO of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth says, “With the 19.10 release, Ubuntu continues to deliver strong support, security and superior economics to enterprises, developers and the wider community.” The Ubuntu team has notified users that Ubuntu 19.10 will be only supported for 9 months, until July 2020. Users are also advised to use Ubuntu 18.04 for Long Term Support. What’s new in Ubuntu 19.10? Updated Packages Linux kernel: The new release is based on the Linux 5.3 series and will support AMD Navi GPUs, ARM SoCs, ARM Komeda display, and Intel speed select on Xeon servers. In order to improve the boot speed, the default kernel compression algorithm is moved to lz4 on most architectures. The default initramfs compression algorithm has also changed to lz4 on all architectures. Toolchain Upgrades: It also brings new upstream releases of glibc 2.30, OpenJDK 11, Rust 1.37, GCC 9.2, updated Python 3.7.5, Python 3.8.0 (interpreter only), ruby 2.5.5, php 7.3.8, perl 5.28.1, golang 1.12.10. Read More: Ubuntu has decided to drop i386 (32-bit) architecture from Ubuntu 19.10 onwards Security Improvements Ubuntu 19.10 explores additional default hardening options that are enabled in GGC like support for both stack clash protection and control-flow integrity protection. Ubuntu Desktop GNOME 3.34 desktop: Ubuntu 19.10 includes GNOME 3.34 which includes a lot of bug fixes, some new features and a significant improvement in responsiveness and speed. It allows to group icons in the Activities overview, has improved wallpaper and wi-fi settings. ZFS on root: This feature is included as an experimental feature in this release. Users can create the ZFS file system and also partition the layout from the installer directly. Read More: Ubuntu 19.10 will now support experimental ZFS root file-system install option NVIDIA-specific improvements: The driver is now included in the ISO and has improved startup reliability when the NVIDIA driver is in use.  Ubuntu 19.10 also brings improved smoothness and frame rates for NVIDIA. Other new features in Ubuntu 19.10 A USB drive can be plugged in and accessed directly from the dock. New themes like Yaru light and dark variants are now available. Support for DLNA sharing is now available by default. Ubuntu Server Images: Ubuntu 19.10 prefers the production-ready ppc64el and arm64 live-server ISO images to install Ubuntu Server on bare metal on the two architectures. Raspberry Pi: The Raspberry Pi 32-bit and 64-bit preinstalled images (raspi3) are supported in this release. Also, Ubuntu images will now support almost all the devices of the Raspberry family Pi 2, Pi 3B, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4. Users have appreciated the new features in Ubuntu 19.10. https://twitter.com/dont39350/status/1184902506238926850 https://twitter.com/ImpWarfare/status/1184844081576456193 https://twitter.com/robinjuste/status/1183891524242857986 These are some of the selected updates in Ubuntu 19.10, read the release notes for more information. You can also check out the Ubuntu blog for more details on the release. Swift shares diagnostic architecture improvements that will be part of the Swift 5.2 release Microsoft launches Open Application Model (OAM) and Dapr to ease developments in Kubernetes and microservices What to expect from D programming language in the near future Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, was hacked; Ubuntu source code unaffected Xubuntu 19.04 releases with latest Xfce package releases, new wallpapers and more

Similar to the npm registry, RubyGems, and Docker Hub, GitHub also introduced its own package management service called GitHub Package Registry in May this year. After gathering community feedback, the team yesterday announced that the service now has proxy support for the primary npm registry. Also, the feature that created a release whenever you published a package is now removed. GitHub Package Registry and its features GitHub Package Registry allows you to host packages publicly or privately and code in one place. It provides you an end-to-end DevOps workflow consisting of your code, Continuous Integration (CI), and deployment solutions by integrating with GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions, and Webhooks. There are a number of features that GitHub Package Registry comes with. It inherits the permissions and visibility associated with the repository. This unified permissions management relieves organizations from maintaining a separate package registry and mirror permissions across systems. GitHub Package Registry gives you an insight into packages by providing data such as download statistics, version history, and more. It also supports multi-format packages so you can host multiple software package types in one registry. Read also: GitHub announces the beta version of GitHub Package Registry, its new package management service Proxy support for the primary npm registry With the npm.js proxy support, developers will be able to set the GitHub Package Registry as the source of their organization’s npm packages and the proxied source of packages from npm. To use this feature you just need to change OWNER to your GitHub organization or username in your project’s ‘.npmrc’ file. This will instruct npm to redirect all package requests to GitHub Package Registry, which will then serve any requests for a package in your account. In the future, the team plans to expand this feature to support other npm sources as well and add proxy support for other package types including Maven, NuGet, and Ruby. In order to prevent outages, they also plan to build a permanent cache on top of the proxy service. Another update is that the feature that automatically created releases when you published a package, is now removed. Explaining the reason, the team wrote in the announcement, “Many customers expressed that automatically creating a release for every package published was unexpected and undesirable and that it led to conflicts for repositories that were managing their releases closely already. As of today, publishing a package will no longer create an accompanying release.” The service is currently available in a limited public beta. GitHub is planning to make the service generally available via GitHub Universe later this year. Till then, it seeks for your feedback through the GitHub Package Registry survey. You can read the official announcement to know more in detail. Other news in programming Core Python team confirms sunsetting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 Developers from the Swift for TensorFlow project propose adding first-class differentiable programming to Swift Go 1.13 releases with error wrapping, TLS 1.3 enabled by default, improved number literals, and more