Tech News - Programming

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

Last week, as per the schedule, the ISO C++ Committee met in Kona, Hawaii to finalize the feature set for the next International Standard (IS), C++ 20. The committee has announced that C++20 is now feature complete and they are planning to finish the C++20 specification at the upcoming meeting, which is scheduled to happen in July 2019. Once the specification is complete they are planning to send the Committee Draft for review. Some of the features this draft include Modules With the introduction of modules, developers will not require to separate their files into header and source parts. The committee has now fixed internal linkage escaping modules. Coroutines The committee has gone through the coroutines proposals and has decided to go ahead with the specification. According to the specification of this feature, three keywords will be added: co_await, co_yield, and co_return. Contracts Contracts are made up of preconditions, postconditions, and assertions. These act as a basic mitigation measure when a program goes wrong because of some mismatch of expectations between parts of the programs. The committee is focused on refining the feature and renamed expects/ensures to pre/post. Concepts The concepts library include the definitions of fundamental library concepts, which are used for compile-time validation of template arguments and perform function dispatch on properties of types. Ranges The ranges library comes with components for dealing with ranges of elements including a variety of view adapters. To read the entire announcement, check out this Reddit thread. Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019 How to build Template Metaprogramming (TMP) using C++[Tutorial] Mio, a header-only C++11 memory mapping library, released!

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

Grain is a strongly-typed functional programming language built for the modern web by leveraging the brilliant work done by the WebAssembly project. Unlike other languages used on the web today (like TypeScript or Elm), that compile into JavaScript, Grain doesn’t compile into JavaScript but compiles all the way down to WebAssembly, supported by a tiny JavaScript runtime to give it access to web features that WebAssembly doesn’t support yet. It was designed with the purpose to specifically serve web developers. Following are the language features: No runtime type errors Grain does not need any kind of type annotations. All the pieces of Grain code that developers write is thoroughly sifted for type errors. Developers do not have to deal with runtime exceptions and thus achieving full type safety with none of the fuss. Being functional, but flexible Grain is geared towards functional programming, but understands the web isn't as pure as we would like it to be. It enables one to easily write what's appropriate for the scenario. Embracing new web standards Grain is built on top of WebAssembly, a brand-new technology that represents a paradigm shift in web development. WebAssembly is nothing but a bytecode format which is executed in a web browser. This allows an application to be deployed to a device with a compliant web browser having to go through any explicit installation steps. TypeScript 3.0 is finally released with ‘improved errors’, editor productivity and more Elm and TypeScript – Static typing on the Frontend Tools in TypeScript

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

Facebook AI team announced a new tool, called Aroma, last week. Aroma is a code-to-code search and recommendation tool that makes use of machine learning (ML) to simplify the process of gaining insights from big codebases. Aroma allows engineers to find common coding patterns easily by making a search query without any need to manually browse through code snippets. This, in turn, helps save time in their development workflow. So, in case a developer has written code but wants to see how others have implemented the same code, he can run the search query to find similar code in related projects. After the search query is run, results for codes are returned as code ‘recommendations’. Each code recommendation is built from a cluster of similar code snippets that are found in the repository. Aroma is a more advanced tool in comparison to the other traditional code search tools. For instance, Aroma performs the search on syntax trees. Instead of looking for string-level or token-level matches, Aroma can find instances that are syntactically similar to the query code. It can then further highlight the matching code by cutting down the unrelated syntax structures. Aroma is very fast and creates recommendations within seconds for large codebases. Moreover, Aroma’s core algorithm is language-agnostic and can be deployed across codebases in Hack, JavaScript, Python, and Java. How does Aroma work? Aroma follows a three-step process to make code recommendations, namely, Feature-based search, re-ranking and clustering, and intersecting. For feature-based search, Aroma indexes the code corpus as a sparse matrix. It parses each method in the corpus and then creates its parse tree. It further extracts a set of structural features from the parse tree of each method. These features capture information about variable usage, method calls, and control structures. Finally, a sparse vector is created for each method according to its features and then the top 1,000 method bodies whose dot products are highest are retrieved as the candidate set for the recommendation. Aroma In the case of re-ranking and clustering, Aroma first reranks the candidate methods by their similarity to the query code snippet. Since the sparse vectors contain only abstract information about what features are present, the dot product score is an underestimate of the actual similarity of a code snippet to the query. To eliminate that, Aroma applies ‘pruning’ on the method syntax trees. This helps to discard the irrelevant parts of a method body and helps retain all the parts best match the query snippet. This is how it reranks the candidate code snippets by their actual similarities to the query. Further ahead, Aroma runs an iterative clustering algorithm to find clusters of code snippets similar to each other and consist of extra statements useful for making code recommendations. In the case of intersecting, a code snippet is taken first as the “base” code and then ‘pruning’ is applied iteratively on it with respect to every other method in the cluster. The remaining code after the pruning process is the code which is common among all methods, making it a code recommendation. “We believe that programming should become a semiautomated task in which humans express higher-level ideas and detailed implementation is done by the computers themselves”, states Facebook AI team. For more information, check out the official Facebook AI blog. How to make machine learning based recommendations using Julia [Tutorial] Facebook AI open-sources PyTorch-BigGraph for faster embeddings in large graphs Facebook AI research and NYU school of medicine announces new open-source AI models and MRI dataset

Last week, Qt introduced Qt for Python 5.12, an official set of Python bindings for Qt, used for simplifying the creation of innovative and immersive user interfaces for Python applications. With Qt for Python 5.12, it is possible to quickly visualize the massive amounts of data tied to their Python development projects. https://twitter.com/qtproject/status/1076003585979232256 Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a cross-platform environment for all development needs. Qt’s user interface development framework features APIs and expansive graphics libraries. Qt for Python 5.12 provides the developers with a user-friendly platform. It is fully supported by the Qt Professional Services team of development experts and practitioners, as well as Qt’s global community. Lars Knoll, CTO of Qt, said, “Considering the huge data sets that Python developers work with on a daily basis, Qt’s graphical capabilities makes it a perfect fit for the creation of immersive Python user interfaces. With Qt for Python 5.12, our customers can build those user interfaces faster and more easily than ever before – with the knowledge that they are backed by a global team of Qt and user interface experts.” Features of Qt for Python 5.12 PySide2 Qt comes with a C++ framework, combined with the PySide2 Python module that offers a comprehensive set of bindings between Python and Qt Qt GUI Creation Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI) creation consists of the following functional modules: Qt Widgets: The Qt Widgets Module comes with a set of user interface elements for creating classic desktop-style user interfaces. Qt Quick: The Qt Quick module, a standard library for writing QML applications, contains Quick Controls for creating fluid user interfaces. Qt QML: The Qt QML module features a framework for developing applications and libraries with the QML language, a declarative language that allows user interfaces to be described in terms of their visual components. Environment familiarity: Qt for Python 5.12 comes with a familiar development environment for Python developers. PyPI: Python Package Index (PyPI) makes the installation process of Qt for Python 5.12 easy. VFX Reference Platform integration: Qt and Qt for Python 5.12 are integral parts of the VFX Reference Platform, a set of tool and library versions used for building software for the VFX industry. Qt 3D Animation: The Qt 3D animation module features a set of prebuilt elements to help developers get started with Qt 3D. Qt Sql: It provides a driver layer, SQL API layer, and a user interface layer for SQL databases. Qt for Python 5.12 is available under commercial licensing, as part of the products Qt for Application Development and Qt for Device Creation, and as open-source under the LGPLv3 license. Qt TextToSpeech: It provides an API for accessing text-to-speech engines. Easy and quick development Development with Qt for Python 5.12 is fun, fast and flexible. Developers can easily work on their applications using Qt for Python 5.12. Developers can power their UI development by utilizing ready-made widgets, controls, beautiful charts, and data visualizations and create stunning 2D/3D graphics for Python projects. Qt Community Developers can exchange ideas, learn, share, and connect with the Qt community. Global Qt Services Global Qt services provide tailored support at every stage of the product development lifecycle. What’s next in Qt for Python The team at Qt might simplify the deployment of PySide2 applications. They might also provide a smoother interaction with other Python modules and support other platforms like embedded and mobile. Users are excited about this project and are eagerly waiting for the stable release. Qt for Python will be helpful for developers as it makes the process of developing desktop apps easier. But few users still are with PyQt5 as the stable release for Qt for python hasn’t been rolled out yet. The switch from PyQt to PySide might be difficult for many. To know more about Qt for Python 5.12, check out Qt’s official website. Getting started with Qt Widgets in Android Qt Design Studio 1.0 released with Qt photoshop bridge, timeline based animations and Qt live preview Qt team releases Qt Creator 4.8.0 and Qt 5.12 LTS

Yesterday, on the first day of Microsoft Build 2019, the team behind .NET Core announced that .NET Core 3.0 will be .NET 5, which will also be the next big release in the .NET family. Now there will be just one .NET going forward, and users will be able to use it to target  Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and much more. .NET Core team will also introduce new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities and language features as part of .NET 5 along with the first preview, which is expected in November 2020. .NET 5 takes .NET Core and the best of Mono, runtime for .NET Core, to create a single platform that you can use for all your modern .NET code. This release will be supported with future updates to Visual Studio 2019, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio for Mac. What is expected in .NET 5? Switch build in runtimes .NET Core has two main runtimes, namely, Mono which is the original cross-platform implementation of .NET and CoreCLR which is primarily targeted at supporting cloud applications, including the largest services at Microsoft. Both runtimes have a lot of similarities, so, the team has decided to make CoreCLR and Mono drop-in replacements for one another. The team plans to make it easier for users to choose between the different runtime options. .NET 5 applications In this release, all the .NET 5 applications will be using the CoreFX framework which will work smoothly with Xamarin and client-side Blazor workloads. These .NET 5 applications will be buildable with the .NET CLI, which will ensure that users have common command-line tooling across projects. Naming The team thought of simplifying the naming as there is only one .NET going forward, so there is no need of clarifying term like “Core”. According to the team, .NET 5 is a shorter name and also communicates that it has uniform capabilities and behaviors. Others ways in which .NET 5 project will improve are: This release will produce a single .NET runtime and framework which has a uniform runtime behaviour and developer experiences and can be used everywhere. This release will also expand the capabilities of .NET by reflecting the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono. It will also help in building projects out of a single code-base that developers can work on and expand together. Also, the code and project files will look and feel the same no matter which type of app is getting built. Users will continue to get access to the same runtime, API and language capabilities with each app. Users will now have more choice for runtime experiences. This release will come with Java interoperability for all the platforms. In this release, Objective-C and Swift interoperability will be supported on multiple operating systems. What won’t change? NET Core will continue to be open source and community-oriented on GitHub. It will still have cross-platform implementation. This release will also support platform-specific capabilities, such as Windows Forms and WPF on Windows, etc. It will support side-by-side installation and provide high performance. It will also support small project files (SDK-style) and command-line interface (CLI). A glimpse at the future roadmap Image source: Microsoft The blog reads, “The .NET 5 project is an important and exciting new direction for .NET. You will see .NET become simpler but also have a broader and more expansive capability and utility. All new development and feature capabilities will be part of .NET 5, including new C# versions. We see a bright future ahead in which you can use the same.” To know more about this news, check out Microsoft’s blog post. Fedora 31 will now come with Mono 5 to offer open-source .NET support .NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions – Async .NET 4.5 Extension Methods on IQueryable  

Last month, Facebook announced that it’s going to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra and Calibra, a payment platform that sits on top of the cryptocurrency, unveiling its plans to develop an entirely new ecosystem for digital transactions. It also developed a new programming language, “Move” for implementing custom transaction logic and “smart contracts” on the Libra Blockchain. The Move language is written entirely in Rust. Although Facebook’s media garnered a massive media attention and had investors and partners from the likes of PayPal, loan platform Kiva, Uber, and Lyft, it had its own share of concerns. The US administration is worried about a non-governmental currency in the hands of big tech companies. Early July, the US congress asked Facebook to suspend the implementation of Libra until the ramifications were investigated. Last week, at the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services hearing, investigating Libra’s security related challenges, Congressman Denver Riggleman posed an important question to David Marcus, head of Calibra, asking why the Rust language was chosen for Libra. Riggleman: I was really surprised about the Rust language. So my first question is, why was the Rust language chosen as the implementation language for Libra? Do you believe it's mature enough to handle the security challenges that will affect these large cryptocurrency transactions? Marcus: The Libra association will own the repository for the code. While there are many flavors and branches being developed by third parties, only safe and verified code will actually be committed to the actual Libra code base which is going to be under the governance of the Libra association. Riggleman: It looks like Libra was built on the nightly build of the Rust programming language. It's interesting because that's not how we did releases at the DoD. What features of Rust are only available in the nightly build that aren't in the official releases of Rust? Does Facebook see it as a concern that they are dependent on unofficially released features of the Rust programming language? Why the nightly releases? Do you see this as a function of the prototyping phase of this? Marcus: Congressman, I don’t have the answers to your very technical questions but I commit that we will get back to you with more details on your questions. Marcus appeared before two US congressional hearing sessions last week where he was constantly grilled by legislators. The grilling led to a dramatic alteration in the strategy of Libra. Marcus has clarified that Facebook won't move forward with Libra until all concerns are addressed. The original vision of Facebook with Libra was to be an open and largely decentralized network which would be beyond the reach of regulators. Instead, regulatory compliance would be the responsibility of exchanges, wallets, and other services called the Libra association. Post the hearing Marcus has stated that the Libra Association would have a deliberately limited role in regulatory matters. Per ArsTechnica, Calibra, would follow US regulations on consumer protection, money laundering, sanctions, and so forth. But Facebook didn't seem to have plans for the Libra Association, Facebook, or any associated entity to police illegal activity on the Libra network as a whole. This video clipping sparked quite the discussion on Hacker News and Reddit with people applauding the QnA session. Some appreciated that legislators are now asking tough questions like these. “It's cool to see a congressman who has this level of software dev knowledge and is asking valid questions.” “Denver Riggleman was an Air Force intelligence officer for 11 years, then he became an NSA contractor. I'm not surprised he's asking reasonable questions.” “I don't think I've ever heard of a Congressman going to GitHub, poking around in some open source code, and then asking very cogent and relevant questions about it. This video is incredible if only because of that.” Others commented on why Congress may have trust issues with using a young programming language like Rust for something like Libra, which requires layers of privacy and security measures. “Traditionally, government people have trust issues with programming languages as the compiler is, itself, an attack vector. If you are using a nightly release of the compiler, it may be assumed by some that the compiler is not vetted for security and could inject unstable or malicious code into another critical codebase. Also, Rust is considered very young for security type work, people rightly assume there are unfound weaknesses due to the newness of the language and related libraries”, reads one comment from Hacker News. Another adds, “Governments have issues with non-stable code because it changes rapidly, is untested and a security risk. Facebook moves fast and break things.” Rust was declared as the most loved programming language by developers in the Stack Overflow survey 2019. This year more or less most major platforms have  jumped on the bandwagon of writing or rewriting its components in the Rust programming language. Last month, post the release of Libra, Calibra tech lead Ben Maurer took to Reddit to explain why Facebook chose the programming language Rust. Per Maurer, “As a project where security is a primary focus, the type-safety and memory-safety of Rust were extremely appealing. Over the past year, we've found that even though Rust has a high learning curve, it's an investment that has paid off. Rust has helped us build a clean, principled blockchain implementation. Part of our decision to choose Rust was based on the incredible momentum this community has achieved. We'll need to work together on challenges like tooling, build times, and strengthening the ecosystem of 3rd-party crates needed by security-sensitive projects like ours.” Not just Facebook, last week, Microsoft announced plans to replace their C and C++ code with Rust calling it a “modern safer system programming language” with great memory safety features. In June, Brave ad-blocker also released a new engine written in Rust which gives 69x better performance. Airbnb has introduced PyOxidizer, a Python application packaging and distribution tool written in Rust. “I’m concerned about Libra’s model for decentralization”, says co-founder of Chainspace, Facebook’s blockchain acquisition Facebook launches Libra and Calibra in a move to seriously disrupt the financial sector Facebook releases Pythia, a deep learning framework for vision and language multimodal research

Yesterday, the team behind iTerm2, the GPL-licensed terminal emulator for macOS, announced the release of iTerm2 3.3.0. It is a major release with many new features such as the new Python scripting API, a new scriptable status bar, two new themes, and more. iTerm2 is a successor to iTerm and works on all macOS. It is an open source replacement for Apple's Terminal and is highly customizable as comes with a lot of useful features. Major highlights in iTerm2 3.3.0 A new Python scripting API which can control iTerm2 and extend its behavior has been added. It allows users to write Python scripts easily, thus enabling them to do extensive configuration and customization in iTerm2 3.3.0. A new scriptable status bar has been added with 13 built-in configurable components. iTerm2 3.3.0 comes with two new themes. The first theme is called as Minimal and it helps reducing visual cluster. The second theme can move tabs into the title bar, thus saving space while maintaining the general appearance of a macOS app and is called Compact. Other new features in iTerm2 3.3.0 The session, tab and window titles have been given a new appearance to make it more flexible and comprehensible. It is now possible to configure these titles separately and also to select what type of information it shows per profile. These titles are integrated with the new Python scripting API. The tabs title has new icons, which either indicates a running app or a fixed icon per profile. A new tool belt called ‘Actions’ has been introduced in iTerm2 3.3.0. It provides shortcuts  to frequent actions like sending a snippet of a text. A new utility ‘it2git’ which allows the git status bar component to show git state on a remote host, has been added. New support for crossed-out text (SGR 9) and automatically restarting a session when it ends has also been added in iTerm2 3.3.0. Other Improvements in iTerm2 3.3.0 Many visual improvements Updated app icon Various pages of preferences have been rearranged to make it more visually appealing The password manager can be used to enter a password securely A new option to log Automatic Profile Switching messages to the scripting console has been added The long scrollback history’s performance has been improved Users love the new features in iTerm2 3.3.0 release, specially the new Python API, the scriptable status bar and the new Minimal mode. https://twitter.com/lambdanerd/status/1157004396808552448 https://twitter.com/alloydwhitlock/status/1156962293760036865 https://twitter.com/josephcs/status/1157193431162036224 https://twitter.com/dump/status/1156900168127713280 A user on Hacker News comments, “First off, wow love the status bar idea.” Another user on Hacker News says “Kudos to Mr. Nachman on continuing to develop a terrific piece of macOS software! I've been running the 3.3 betas for a while and some of the new functionality is really great. Exporting a recording of a terminal session from the "Instant Replay" panel is very handy!” Few users are not impressed with iTerm2 3.3.0 features and are comparing it with the Terminal app. A comment on Hacker News reads, “I like having options but wouldn’t recommend iTerm. Apple’s Terminal.app is more performant rendering text and more responsive to input while admittedly having somewhat less unnecessary features. In fact, iTerm is one of the slowest terminals out there! iTerm used to have a lot of really compelling stuff that was missing from the official terminal like tabs, etc that made straying away from the canonical terminal app worth it but most of them eventually made their way to Terminal.app so nowadays it’s mostly just fluff.” For the full list of improvements in iTerm2 3.3.0, visit the iTerm2 changelog page. Apple previews macOS Catalina 10.15 beta, featuring Apple music, TV apps, security, zsh shell, driverKit, and much more! WWDC 2019 highlights: Apple introduces SwiftUI, new privacy-focused sign in, updates to iOS, macOS, and iPad and more Safari Technology Preview release 83 now available for macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra

After the first release candidate last month, Java 11 is now generally available. The GA version is the first release with long-term support (LTS). Some of the new features include nest-based access control, a new garbage collector, support for Unicode 11 and TLS 1.3. New features in Java 11 Some of the new features in Java 11 include nest-based access control, dynamic class-file constants, a no-op garbage collector called Epsilon and more. Let’s look at these features in detail. Nest-based access control ‘Nests’ are introduced as an access control context that aligns with the existing nested types in Java. Classes that are logically part of the same code but are compiled to distinct files can access private members with nests. It eliminates the need for compilers to insert bridge methods. Two members in a nest are described as ‘nestmates’. Nests do not apply to large scales of access control like modules. Dynamic class-file constants The existing Java class-file format is extended to support a new constant-pool form called CONSTANT_Dynamic. Loading this new form will delegate its creation to a bootstrap method in the same way linking an invokedynamic call site delegates linkage to a bootstrap method. The aim is to reduce the cost and disruption of creating new forms of materializable class-file constants giving broader options to language designers and compiler implementors. Epsilon, a no-op garbage collector Epsilon is a new experimental garbage collector in Java 11 that handles memory allocation but does not actually reclaim any memory. It works by implementing linear allocation in a single contiguous chunk memory. The JVM will shut down when the available Java heap is exhausted. Added support for Unicode 11 Java 11 brings Unicode 11 support to existing platform APIs. The following Java classes are mainly supported with Unicode 10: In the java.lang package: Character and String In the java.awt.font package: NumericShaper In the java.text package: Bidi, BreakIterator, and Normalizer This upgrade includes Unicode 9 changes and adds a total of 16,018 characters and ten new scripts. Flight recorder The flight recorder in Java 11 is a data collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM. It has a low overhead. TLS  1.3 TLS 1.3 was recently standardized and is the latest version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. TLS 1.3 is not directly compatible with the previous versions. The goal here is not to support every feature of TLS 1.3. Features deprecated Some of the features are also removed from Java 11. Applications depending on Java EE and COBRA modules need to explicitly call these modules. The Nashorn JavaScript Engine, Pack200 Tools and API have all been deprecated. For a complete list of features and deprecations, visit the JDK website. Oracle releases open source and commercial licenses for Java 11 and later JEP 325: Revamped switch statements that can also be expressions proposed for Java 12 No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019

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

Last week, the team at ParaSail, released a new version of the parallel programming language, ParaSail 8.0 (ParaSail stands for Parallel Specification and Implementation Language). This programming language is designed for supporting the development of inherently safe and parallel applications that can be mapped to multicore, heterogeneous, or distributed architectures. It provides support for both implicit and explicit parallelism. All the ParaSail expressions are defined to have parallel evaluation semantics. What’s new in ParaSail 8.0 Debugger This release comes with an interactive debugger that is automatically invoked when the interpreter encounters a precondition, assertion, or postcondition that fails at run-time.  This release comes with fully analyzed pre- and postconditions that are checked at run-time. ParaSail LLVM-based Compiler This release comes with a translator that translates PSVM (ParaSail virtual machine) instructions to LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine) instructions, and from there to object code. Language design principles According to the new design principles, the language should be easy to read. The readability should be emphasized over symbols and should be similar to existing languages, mathematics, or logic. As the programs are usually scanned backward, so ending indicators should be as informative as starting indicators for composite constructs. For example, “end loop” or “end class Stack” rather than simply “end” or “}”. Parallelism should be built into the language so that resulting programs can easily take advantage of as many cores as are available on the host computer. Features that are error-prone or that can complicate the testing or proof process should be eliminated. Language-defined types and user-defined types should use the same syntax and have the same capabilities. All the modules should be generic templates or equivalent. The language should be safe and the compiler should detect all potential race conditions as well as all potential runtime errors. Enhanced ParaSail syntax In this release, the back-quote character followed by a parenthesized expression may now appear within a string literal. Also, the value of the expression is interpolated into the middle of the string, in place of the back-quoted expression. Reserved words A list of words is now reserved in ParaSail. Few words from this list are, abs, abstract, all, and, block, case, class, concurrent, const, continue, each, else, elsif, end, exit, extends. Object reference Now a reference to an existing object can be declared using the following syntax: object_reference_declaration ::= ’ref’ [ var_or_const ] identifier [’:’ type_specifier ] ’=>’ object_name ’;’ Deprecations ParaSail has removed a few of the features for ensuring safe parallelism: The global variables have been removed so that operations may only access variables passed as parameters. The parameter aliasing has been eliminated so that two parameters passed to the same operation don’t refer to the same object if one of the parameters is updatable within the operation. Pointers have been removed so that optional and expandable objects and generalized indexing can provide an approach that allows safe parallelization. Run-time exception handling has been eliminated so that it is possible for strong compile-time checking of preconditions and establish support for parallel event-handling. The global garbage-collected heap has been removed so that  automatic storage management is provided. Explicit threads, lock/unlock, or signal/wait has been eliminated so that parallel activities are identified automatically by the compiler. Many users are not much happy with this news. Some  are unhappy with the CSS and are asking the team to fix it. One of the comments on HackerNews reads, “Please fix the CSS: I have to scroll horizontally every single line. I stopped at the first one. Tested with Firefox and Chrome on Android. Firefox reader mode doesn't work on that site.” Another user commented, “I was able to read it on my Android device in Chrome by using landscape mode. Until I scrolled down a little. Then a huge static navigation popup appeared taking up 40% of the screen!” Few others think that Fortran is better than ParaSail as it lets developers to name the loops. Some others are excited about pre/post conditions. One of the users commented, “Having built in pre/post conditions is pretty nice.” Read more about this news on ParaSail’s official website. Racket 7.2, a descendent of Scheme and Lisp, is now out! Typescript 3.3 is finally released! Announcing Julia v1.1 with better exception handling and other improvements

Last week, Bryn Jackson, CEO of Spectrum, a real-time community-centered conversational platform, announced that the project is now acquired by GitHub. Bryn, along with Brian Lovin, and Max Stoiber founded the Spectrum community platform in February 2017. This community is a place to ask questions, request features, report bugs, and also chat with the Spectrum team for queries. In a blogpost Bryn wrote, “After releasing an early prototype, people told us they also wanted to use it for their communities, so we decided to go all-in and build an open, inclusive home for developer and designer communities. Since officially launching the platform late last year, Spectrum has become home to almost 5,000 communities!” What will Spectrum bring to GitHub communities? By joining GitHub, Spectrum aims to align to GitHub’s goals of making developer lives easier and of fostering a strong community across the globe. For communities across GitHub, Spectrum will provide: A space for different communities across the internet. Free access to its full suite of features - including unlimited moderators, private communities and channels, and community analytics. A deeper integration with GitHub Spectrum has also opened a pull request to add some of GitHub’s policies to Spectrum’s Privacy Policy, which will be merged this week. Though many users have not heard about Spectrum, they are positively reacting towards its acquisition by GitHub. Many users have also compared it with other platforms such as Slack, Discord, and Gitter. To know more about this news, read Bryn Jackson’s blog post. GitHub Octoverse: The top programming languages of 2018 GitHub has passed an incredible 100 million repositories Github now allows repository owners to delete an issue: curse or a boon?

Can you guess what is common between, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison? Yes they are very successful trendsetters in tech, some being co-founders and founders of top tech companies. But what else? They are also college dropouts. The point here I want to highlight is that real skills are more important than acquired college degrees. If you do not have a college degree, but have the skill set a company wants, you are in! In today’s economy it is important to have hands-on experience instead of being only book smart. Last week, the job searching website, Glassdoor compiled a list of Top companies that do not require a 4 year college degree as long as you have the skills required. The list includes some of the top tech companies as well such as Google, Apple, and IBM. Google has clearly mentioned on their web page: Source: Google If no degrees, then what? Now, you must be thinking that if these companies are not looking at your GPAs then how are they going to shortlist n number of applications coming their way. Remember the names I called out in the beginning? They have something more in common. They believed in self-learning, were passionate and innovative, and had clear goals. Sam Ladah, IBM’s head of talent organization, calls these type of jobs, “new-collar jobs.” He told the Marketplace in an interview that IBM consider the applicants based on their skills. This includes applicants who didn’t get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. They have also been finding talents from coding bootcamps. A very good example of finding talent beyond traditional educational boundaries is Tanmay Bakshi, one of the youngest software programmers in the world. At the age of 11, he came across a documentary on the IBM Watson and how it played Jeopardy. He was immediately hooked to IBM Watson and AI and found inspiration to build his own first Watson app called “Ask Tanmay”. Later he was able to find a bug in the Document Conversion service by IBM and posted that on his Twitter. IBMers who were working on this service took a note of this and contacted Tanmay. Two of those initial contacts eventually became his mentors and assisted him in collaborating with IBM. Even if you have a degree in any other background but are keen on learning software development and bagging a job in top-tech companies, you can start anytime. Margaret Hamilton, the Director of the Software Engineer Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1960 and later the CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc, was actually a Mathematics graduate. Angela Taylor, who was working as an HR person in Google, with her hardwork and can-do attitude became a Google engineer. She fell in love with programming when she volunteered to fix a spreadsheet and learned Visual Basic for it. These were a few examples of the people who were able to challenge the current education system and became successful. Here is a great Medium post which could give you some amazing tips to further your career, if you are a coder but not an engineer. 1k+ Google employees frustrated with continued betrayal, protest against Censored Search engine project for China 16 year old hacked into Apple’s servers, accessed ‘extremely secure’ customer accounts for over a year undetected Facebook, Apple, Spotify pull Alex Jones content