Tech News - Programming

Yesterday, Google announced the general availability of a new API for Google Docs that will help developers to automate their tasks that users manually do in the company’s online office suite. This API lets users read and write documents programmatically so that users can integrate data from various sources. Since Google Cloud Next 2018, this API has been in developer preview and is now available to all developers. This API lets users automate processes, create documentation in bulk and generate invoices or contracts. With this API, developers can set up processes that manipulate documents. It gives the ability to insert, move, delete, merge and format text, insert inline images and work with lists. Zapier, Netflix, Mailchimp and Final Draft are some of the companies that built solutions based on the new API during the preview period. Zapier integrated the Docs API into its workflow automation tool for helping users to create offer letters based on a template. Netflix used it to build an internal tool that allows its engineers to gather data and automate its documentation workflow. This API will help the users to regularly create similar documents with changing order numbers and line items based on information from third-party systems. The API’s import/export abilities help users for using the Docs for internal content management systems. Few users are happy with this news and excited to use the API. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “That is such great work. Getting the job done with the tools already around is just such a good feeling.” Whereas, few others think that it will take some time for Google to reach where Microsoft is now. Another comment reads, “They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been.” Another user commented, “Microsoft Flow is a really powerful - in terms of advanced capabilities it offers.” To know more about this news, check out Google’s official post. Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Youtube promises to reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Ex-googler explains why this is a ‘historic victory’ Google’s Adiantum, a new encryption standard for lower-end phones and other smart devices

After Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,  Microsoft’s LinkedIn is getting into the league of video live streaming service by launching ‘LinkedIn Live’, this week, as reported by TechCrunch. This feature will allow people and organizations to broadcast real-time video to selected groups or the entire LinkedIn audience. Though, it’s still not clear when will LinkedIn make it possible for everyone to create LinkedIn live videos. LinkedIn Live will be rolled out to selected U.S. users via invite-only for the initial beta phase. Eventually, LinkedIn will also post a contact form for the users who want to apply for accessing this service. The initial live content that LinkedIn hopes to broadcast would include conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by mentors and influencers, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies, and more. LinkedIn is partnering with several third-party developers of live broadcasting streaming services including, Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Wowza Media Systems and more for creating and posting more polished live video on LinkedIn. Microsoft’s Azure cloud media product will be handling the encoding services for LinkedIn Live. The reason behind bringing LinkedIn Live LinkedIn introduced its first native video features in 2017 and within 17 months, LinkedIn has seen a boost in traffic and revenues from videos on its platform. Pete Davies, the director of product management at LinkedIn, said, “Video is the fastest growing format on our platform right now, and the one most likely to get people talking. Live video has been a big request—not least, I’d wager, because it is such a prominent part of how video is being used on other social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, putting the functionality front of mind.” Other than user requests, there might be more reasons to add this feature. The reasons could possibly be engagement and revenue generation. LinkedIn has generated revenue around videos via video advertising so far. During Microsoft’s last quarterly earnings, the company reported that revenues at LinkedIn were up 29 percent, with a reference to growing its ads business specifically. In a statement to TechCrunch, LinkedIn said, “Video ads earn 30 percent more comments per impression than non-video ads and that LinkedIn members spend almost three times more time watching video ads compared to time spent with static Sponsored Content.” As content is in the priority of LinkedIn Live, there are chances that the company might explore other ways of monetizing the content beyond ads. For instance, the company could charge viewers for unique experiences like conferences or for making certain Live events. It could also charge users for broadcasting content. LinkedIn might even launch Stories feature soon Last year, the company planned to work on implementing stories feature for the platform. The company plans to start off with “Student Voices” for university students in the U.S. This would allow students to post short videos to their Campus Playlist, which includes short 30-45 seconds videos made by college students. LinkedIn is possibly moving in the direction of rich content, with live streaming videos and stories the company might see a major benefit in terms of revenue and data. These live streaming videos will create an impact on the reach of the platform and also might help the platform’s premium subscription in near future. Tech jobs dominate LinkedIn’s most promising jobs in 2019 LinkedIn used email addresses of 18M non-members to buy targeted ads on Facebook, reveals a report by DPC, Ireland Creator-Side Optimization: How LinkedIn’s new feed model helps small creators    

At FOSDEM 2019, Java language architect Brian Goetz talks about the future of Java in the next few years. Let’s take a look at the highlights of his talk. Java has been around more than 20 years and has been declared dead by critics numerous times. They have kept the language alive by staying relevant to problems and hardware. The faster release cycle allows the Java team to work on good small features. It also helps laying the groundwork for future releases. Preview features help in risk reduction by gathering feedback. There are various projects in the works that will allow Java to adapt to higher expectations of the developers, bring value types, generic specialization, and better interoperability with native code. Switch and pattern matching He goes over the new switch statements in Java 12 with an example. The new expression switch simplifies the code a lot, by allowing not just lesser typing but also makes the code less error prone. Switch expressions is a part of a larger concept called pattern matching. It combines a test, a conditional extraction and a binding into one operation. The code looks cleaner with pattern matching as it eliminates redundant boilerplate. Project Valhalla The goal of this project is to reboot the way JVM lays out data in memory. The hardware has changed drastically in the last three decades. The cost of memory fetch versus arithmetic has increased hundreds of times. Memory efficiency is lost in between this increased cost. Alternatives like stuffing data into arrays under a single header makes the code worse. This project introduces value types that ‘codes like a class, works like an int’. Project Valhalla has been running for the past 5 years and has different phases. The current prototype is called LW1 and has the VM underpinnings validated. The next prototype called LW2 out next year should be good for experimentation. Project metropolis is also in the early stages. It's about replacing the C2 compiler with the Graal compiler. The Java team is working on a lot of features across various categories such as language productivity features, fundamental VM performance features, native interop, concurrency models etc,. They are starting to be better formed now after years of work through various projects. The bi-yearly releases help test more features than before and the limited LTS releases would help the core developers to work with better focus. Project Valhalla seems promising and could possible make Java much more memory efficient. To see code demo and explanation with QnA, you can watch the talk. 7 things Java programmers need to watch for in 2019 Netflix adopts Spring Boot as its core Java framework IntelliJ IDEA 2018.3 is out with support for Java 12, accessibility improvements, GitHub pull requests, and more

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

This Wednesday, OpenChain announced that Microsoft has joined them as a platinum member and a board member to help drive open source compliance. Microsoft is a new addition to the list of many huge companies joining the OpenChain project including Uber, Google, and Facebook. OpenChain General Manager, Shane Coughlan announcing the collaboration said in a blog post, “We’re thrilled that Microsoft has joined the project and welcome their expertise. Microsoft is a strong addition not only in terms of open source but also in standardization. Their membership provides great balance to our community of enterprise, cloud, automotive and silicon companies, allowing us to ensure the standard is suitable for any size company across any industry.” Why Microsoft joined OpenChain? While building new products and services, companies make use of existing open source software provided by their supply chains. Working on these large-scale projects makes it difficult for them to ensure that the license requirements are met in a timely and effective manner. To make open source compliance simpler and more consistent for companies, the OpenChain Project develops standards and training materials. As a part of the OpenChain community, Microsoft will now work more closely with it to create future standards that will help bring even greater trust to the open source ecosystem. It has helped the OpenChain community in developing its upcoming OpenChain Specification version. David Rudin, Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft, said, “Trust is key to open source, and compliance with open source licenses is an important part of building that trust. By joining the OpenChain Project, we look forward to working alongside the community to define compliance standards that help build confidence in the open source ecosystem and supply chain.” Not only with  OpenChain, but Microsoft is also working with the Linux Foundation’s TODO Group, which is an open group of companies who collaborate to create practices, tools, and other ways for running open source programs. It also joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) last year in October and made its entire patent portfolio available to OIN members. Read the full announcement on OpenChain's website. Microsoft Cloud services’ DNS outage results in deleting several Microsoft Azure database records Microsoft announces Internet Explorer 10 will reach end-of-life by January 2020 Microsoft Office 365 now available on the Mac App Store

The January 2019 release of Visual Studio code v1.31 is now available. This update brings Tree UI improvements, updated to the main menu, no reload on extension installation and other changes. Features of Visual Studio code v1.31 No more reloads on installing extensions This was one of the most requested features in the VS community. Now you don’t have to reload VS code whenever you install a new extension. Reload is not needed even when you uninstall an unactivated extension. Improvements to the Tree UI There is a new tree widget based on the already existing list widget. This tree UI was adopted in File Explorer, all debug trees, search, and peek references. Tree UI brings features like: Better keyboard navigation for faster access Hierarchical select all in a tree starting from the inner node the cursor is on Customizable indentation for trees Expand/collapse all tree nodes recursively Horizontal scrolling Improvements to menus There are more navigation actions in the Go menu so that they can be discovered easily. The cut command is now available on the Explorer context menu. Changes in the Editor Text selection is smarter. Search history is shown below the search bar in the References view. Long descriptions can be written using string arrays. Semantic selection In HTML, CSS/LESS/SCSS, and JSON semantic selection is now available. Reflow support in integrated terminal The terminal will now automatically wrap and unwrap text whenever it’s resized. New input variable The input variables were introduced in the previous milestone. In Visual Studio code 1.31, there is a new input variable called command. It runs an arbitrary command when an input variable is interpolated. Updated extension API documentation The VS Code API documentation was rewritten and then moved to its own table of contents. For more details on the improvements in Visual Studio code 1.31 January 2019, visit the release notes. Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019 Microsoft Connect(); 2018 Azure updates: Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, GitHub releases and much more! Neuron: An all-inclusive data science extension for Visual Studio

The Python Software Foundation and JetBrains conducted a Python survey to find the latest trends, usage, adoption in the Python community. There were more than 20,000 participants from over 150 countries. The Python Developers Survey 2018 was conducted for the second time in collaboration after the first one in 2017. Language usage From the Python survey, 84% of the developers stated that they use it as their primary language while the other 16% used it as a secondary language. This is up from the 79% of developers using Python as primary from 2017. About 50% of Python users also use JavaScript while other languages like C/C++, Java, and C# are used lesser than 2017. Bash/Shell is also being used more by Python developers. Python uses 60% of the respondents said that they use Python for both work and personal uses. 21% exclusively for personal, educational or side projects and 19% for work. 58% of Python users use the language for data analysis which is 8% more than last year. 52% use Python for web development and 43% for DevOps/system administration. Machine learning uses also saw an uptick of 7% and stands at 38%. In general, Python is used in data analysis applications more than for Web Development. The above numbers where multiple areas were available as choices. When there was only a single response available, web development was the most popular answer with 27%. Data analysis stood at 17% and machine learning at 11%. Interestingly, if you consider ‘data science’ data analysis and machine learning combined then most Python users are in this area totaling 28%. Python versions in use Python 3 is seeing larger adoption with 84% compared to 75% from 2017. Python 2 stands at 16% and will lose support from the core team next year. Major libraries are already dropping support for Python 2. Frameworks and libraries In web frameworks, Flask and Django were the most popular with 47% and 45%. In data science packages, NumPy was the most used with 62%. pandas and Matplotlib stand at 51% and 46%. To know more in-depth results of the Python survey, you can visit the JetBrains website. pandas will drop support for Python 2 this month with pandas 0.24 Python steering council election results are out for January 2019 Python 3.8.0 alpha 1 is now available for testing

Yesterday Apple talked about exclusivity enforcement in Swift 5, in a post. No this is not some exclusive feature or patenting of some sort. This idea is on how variables in a Swift program access memory. Swift is the programming language used for developing Apple apps. What is exclusivity enforcement? The Swift 5 release allows runtime checks on “Exclusive Access to Memory”. This further adds to Swift showing that it is a ‘safe language’. For memory safety to take place, Swift needs exclusive access to a variable and modify it. This means that the variable can be accessed only with the same name when it is being modified as particular arguments. A programmer’s intention in case of exclusivity violations is often ambiguous in Swift. So, to protect against it and to allow the safety features, exclusivity enforcement was introduced in Swift 4. In Swift 4, both compile-time and run-time enforcement was available, the latter being available only in debug builds. Some of the holes in exclusivity enforcement are patched in Swift 5 by changing the language model. So runtime exclusivity enforcement is enabled by default in Release builds. This can impact Swift projects in two ways: Violation of Swift exclusivity rules causing a runtime trap Overhead due to memory access checks can degrade performance slightly Why exclusivity enforcement? This enforcement is done mainly to enforce memory safety in Swift. It eliminates dangerous interactions in Swift programs which involves mutable states Enforcement gets rid of unspecified behavior rules from Swift It is mandatory to maintain ABI stability In addition to protecting memory safety, this enforcement helps in optimizing performance The exclusivity rules give programmers the control to move only types Even though the memory problem is a rare occurrence, addressing it early on improves Swift a bit. A comment on Hacker news says: “The benefit being that you only have to deal with this issue rarely, rather than all the time with manual memory management.” Apple is patenting Swift features like optional chaining Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta is here with stable ABI Swift is now available on Fedora 28

Last week, the team behind Electron announced that they will share the release timeline for Electron 5.0 and beyond publicly. For now, they have posted the schedule for Electron 5.0, which will include M72 and Node 12.0. Here’s the schedule the team has made public, which can still have some changes: Source: Electron The Electron team has been working towards making its release cycles faster and more stable. In December last year, they planned to release a new version of Electron in cadence with the new versions of its major components including Chromium, V8, and Node. They started working according to this plan and have seen some success. Source: Electron The team was able to release last two versions of Electron (3.0 and 4.0) almost parallelly with Chromium’s latest versions. To keep up with Chromium releases, the two versions were released with a 2-3 month timeline for each release. They will be continuing this pattern for Electron 5.0 and beyond. So, for now, developers can expect a major Electron release approximately every quarter. Read the timeline shared by the Electron team on their official website. Flutter challenges Electron, soon to release a desktop client to accelerate mobile development Electron 3.0.0 releases with experimental textfield, and button APIs Electron Fiddle: A ‘code playground’ for experimenting with cross-platform native apps

Red Hat has come out with a new Integrated development environment (IDE), called CodeReady Workspaces. The new IDE, announced yesterday, is a Kubernetes-native, browser-based environment for developers to enable easier collaboration among the development team. CodeReady Workspaces is based on the open source Eclipse Che integrated development environment (IDE) project and has been optimized for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It offers the enterprise development teams a shareable developer environment, which comprises the tools and dependencies required to code, build, test, run and debug the container-based applications. Other than that, it is the first Kubernetes-native IDE in the market that runs inside a Kubernetes cluster and is capable of managing the developer’s code, and dependencies present inside OpenShift pods and containers. Also, there is no need for the developers to be Kubernetes or OpenShift experts in order to use the IDE. Additionally, Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces comes with a sharing feature called Factories, which is a template containing the source code location, runtime, tooling configuration and commands that are needed for a project. It enables development teams to run the new Kubernetes-native developer environment in a few minutes. Team members can access their own or shared workspaces on any device with a browser and on any IDE and operating system (OS). According to the Red Hat team, CodeReady Workspaces is an ideal platform for DevOps based organizations and allows the IT or development teams to manage workspaces at scale and effectively control system performance, security features and functionality. CodeReady Workspaces allows the developers to: Integrate their preferred version control (public and private repositories). Control workspace permissions and resourcing Make use of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory (AD) authentication for single sign-on. “Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces offers enterprise development teams a collaborative and scalable platform that can enable developers to more efficiently and effectively deliver new applications for Kubernetes and collaborate on container-native applications”, said Brad Micklea, senior director, Developer Experience and Programs, Red Hat. Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces is free with an OpenShift subscription. You can download it by joining the Red Hat Developer Program. For more information, check out the official Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces blog. Red Hat drops MongoDB over concerns related to its Server Side Public License (SSPL) Red Hat acquires Israeli multi-cloud storage software company, NooBaa Red Hat announces full support for Clang/LLVM, Go, and Rust

Last year, the steering council model was elected for Python governance. Now the results for the steering council election, January 2019 are out in PEP 8100. First some background about the steering council model: “Authored by Nathaniel J. Smith, and Donald Stufft, this proposal involves a model for Python governance based on a steering council. The council has vast authority, which they intend to use as rarely as possible, instead, they plan to use this power to establish standard processes. The steering council committee consists of five people. A general philosophy is followed—it’s better to split up large changes into a series of small changes to be reviewed independently. As opposed to trying to do everything in one PEP, the focus is on providing a minimal and solid foundation for future governance decisions. This PEP was accepted on December 17, 2018.” The goals of the model are to be: Boring, stick to the basics and not experiment Simplistic enough for a minimum viable product Comprehensive to avoid confusion Flexible and light-weight Of the 96 eligible voters, only 69 had cast ballots. The nomination period for the election was from January 7, 2019 to January 20, 2019. The voting period was from January 21, 2019 to February 4, 2019. The results are in and the top five candidates are: Barry Warsaw Brett Cannon Carol Willing Guido van Rossum Nick Coghlan Now, these five individuals are a part of the steering council for Python governance. The council will make decisions on PEPs. They will also work on maintaining the stability, quality of the Python language and interpreter. Python governance vote results are here: The steering council model is the winner NYU and AWS introduce Deep Graph Library (DGL), a python package to build neural network graphs Introducing RustPython, a Python 3 interpreter written in Rust

Yesterday, the first alpha of Python 3.8.0 was announced in a Python blog post. The most important change in this version is the addition of Assignment Expressions. This is the first alpha, three more are yet to be released. Keep in mind that the features are raw and not meant for production use. Some changes in Python 3.8.0 alpha 1: Security changes When spawning child processes, the command line option -I to run Python in isolated mode is now copied by the multiprocessing and distutils modules as well OpenSSL is updated to OpenSSL 1.1.0i for Windows builds The thread safety of error handling is fixed in _ssl A small fix to prevent buffer overrun in os.symlink for Windows Changes in core and builtins PEP 572: This introduces a new way which assigns values to variables in an expression by using the NAME := expr notation Parenthesis are made optional for named expressions in a while statement. Python initialization is reorganized to get exceptions and sys.stderr early. A small memory leak is fixed in pymain_parse_cmdline_impl. For unbalanced parentheses in f-string, the syntax messages are better. End line and end column position information are added to the Python AST nodes During the Python initialization, the Python filesystem encoding is read faster Library changes Shared memory submodule is added to multiprocessing in order to avoid serialization between processes The KeyError exception when using enums and compile is now fixed help() on metaclasses is fixed The raise(signum) is now exposed as raise_signal Building enums by value are now faster These were a select few changes in Python 3.8.0 alpha 1. For a complete list of changes, you may go through the changelog. Introducing RustPython, a Python 3 interpreter written in Rust EuroPython Society announces the ‘Guido van Rossum Core Developer Grant’ program to honor Python core developers pandas will drop support for Python 2 this month with pandas 0.24

RustPython is an open-source Python 3 interpreter written in Rust with the whole Python 3 implementation completely done in Rust. This interpreter is currently in the early stages and the documentation is also being developed. You need wasm-pack and npm to install it. You can test it by using the following code: $ git clone https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython $ cd RustPython $ cargo run demo.py Hello, RustPython! The code style used is rustfmt. You can also test with cargo on the interactive shell.You can run only basic examples as currently there is only preliminary support for WebAssembly. Using a memory safe language like Rust instead of C or C++ has benefits as pointed out by a Hacker new user: “At least 1/3 of Python's CVEs could have been prevented by using a memory safe language like Rust.” Another user said: “This is wonderful. This could become the best way to move Python projects to Rust: initially just run on the RustPython interpreter, but then optimize low-level routines in Rust. In 15 years I wouldn't be surprised if this or something like it surpasses CPython in popularity.” For more details and installation instructions visit the GitHub repository. Rust 1.32 released with a print debugger and other changes EuroPython Society announces the ‘Guido van Rossum Core Developer Grant’ program to honor Python core developers Python governance vote results are here: The steering council model is the winner

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

This Saturday, the Golang team released the State of Go February 2019 outlining the developments in the programming language and showing its current state. Since Golang 1.11, changes have been made to the standard library, tooling, and the community. Changes in the standard library html/template The behavior when an interface is typed to an implicit escaper function is changed. It was previously <nil> and is now ignored. Changes under bufio, NewReader The UnreadRune and UnreadByte methods from Reader will return an error if they are called after Peek. new ReplaceAll function There is a new ReplaceAll function where the value passed can be bytes or strings. Changes under builtin: maps printed sorted To print a map sorted by keys, developers can just print the map. However, note that iteration will be done randomly. TLS 1.3 Using TLS 1.3 in Go helps by causing one fewer round trip, securing only cipher suites, and provides support in all major browsers. Tooling changes The following commands now work: go run pkg go run dir Functions can now be run in the debugger. The godoc CLI is now deprecated. The go vet tool is deprecated in Go 1.12. It detects wrapped fmt.Printf errors. modules modules is an alternative to GOPATH. It has integrated versioning and package distribution. runtime/trace Now there are custom events to runtime traces. webassembly Go can now compile to WebAssembly (wasm files) Ports You need Go 1.11 and later for OpenBSD 6.4 arm64 runtime is now faster Windows/arm now has support for Raspberry Pi3 These were a select few important updates from the presentation, for more details you can view The State of Go: Feb 2019. The Golang team has started working on Go 2 proposals Golang just celebrated its ninth anniversary GoCity: Turn your Golang program into a 3D city