Tech News - Programming

GitLab 11.3 was released on Saturday with support for Maven repositories, Code Owners, Protected Environments and other changes. These new added features help in automation of controls around environments and code while also providing further efficiencies for Java developers. Maven repositories in GitLab 11.3 Maven repositories are now directly available in GitLab. This gives Java developers a secure, standardized way to share version control in Maven libraries. It also saves time by reusing these libraries across projects but it is available only on GitLab premium. Lower-level services can now have their packaged libraries published to their project’s Maven repository. They can share a simple XML snippet with other teams to utilize the library while Maven and GitLab do the rest. Code owners and protected environments GitLab Starter now supports assignment of Code Owners to files indicating the appropriate team members contributing to the code. This is a primer for future releases, which will enforce internal controls at the code level. Operators can also use Protected Environments for setting permissions to determine which users can deploy code to production environments. This significantly reduces the risk of an unintended commit. This feature is also available only on premium. Epic forecasting with integrated milestone dates The new Portfolio Management feature in GitLab Ultimate forecasts an epic's start and end dates automatically based on the milestone dates of its issues. Portfolio managers will be able to compare their planned start and end dates against the scheduled work enabling faster decisions on delivery and plan adjustments. In older versions, fixed values could be set for the planned start and end dates of an epic. This was useful for high-level planning of epics. However, as issues are attached to the epic and the issues are scheduled for work with actual milestones, it is useful to have epic dates reflecting those milestones. In this version, the static values for the dates can be changed to a dynamic value called ‘From milestones’. The dynamic version of epic planned end dates are analogous. This is a useful feature to have if you want seamless transition from high-level, top-down planning to micro-level, and bottom-up planning. For more information, visit the GitLab website. GitLab raises $100 million, Alphabet backs it to surpass Microsoft’s GitHub Gitlab 11.2 releases with preview changes in Web IDE, Android Project Import and more GitLab is moving from Azure to Google Cloud in July

Go, the popular programming language is adding an internal language server protocol (LSP). This is expected to bring features like code autocompletion and diagnostics available in Golang. LSP is used between a user and a server to integrate features such as autocomplete, go to definition, find all references and alike into the tool. It was created by Microsoft to define a common language for enabling programming language analyzers to communicate. It is growing in popularity with adoption from companies like Codenvy, Red Hat, and Sourcegraph. There is also a rapidly growing list of editor and language communities supporting LSP. Golang already has a language server available on GitHub. This version has support for Hover jump to def, workspace symbols, and find references. But, it does not support code completion and diagnostics. Sourcegraph CEO Quinn Slack stated in a comment on Hacker News: “The idea is that with a Go language server becoming a core part of Go, it will have a lot more resources invested into it and it will surpass where the current implementation is now.” The Go language server made by Sourcegraph available currently on GitHub is not a core part of Golang. It uses tools and custom extensions not maintained by the Go team. The hope is that the core LSP implementation will be good enough and that SourceGraph can re-use this implementation in the future to bring down the number of implementations to just one. Slack said in a comment that they are very happy with this implementation: “We are 10,000% supportive of this, as we've discussed openly in the golang-tools group and with the Go team. The Go team was commendably empathetic about the optics here, and we urged them very, very, very directly to do this.” This core implementation of LSP by the Golang team is also beneficial for Sourcegraph from a business perspective. Sourcegraph sells a product that lets you search and browse all your code, which involves using language servers for certain features like hovers, definitions and references. Since the core work will be done by the Golang team, Sourcegraph won’t have to invest more time into building their implementation of Go language server. For more information, visit the Googlesource website. Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Go 2 design drafts include plans for better error handling and generics

Rust 2018 RC1 was released yesterday. This new version of the Rust programming language contains features like raw identifiers, better path clarity and other additions. Some of the changes in Rust 2018 RC1 include: Raw identifiers Like many programming languages, Rust too has the concept of "keywords". These identifiers cannot be used in places like variable names, function names, and other places. With Rust 2018 RC1, raw identifiers let you use keywords where they are not allowed normally. New confirmed keywords in Rust 2018 RC1 are async, await, and try. Better path clarity One of the hardest things for people new to Rust is the module system. While there are simple and consistent rules defining the module system, their consequences can appear to be inconsistent and hard to understand. Rust 2018 RC1 introduces a few new module system features to simplify the module system and give a better picture of what is going on. extern crate is no longer needed. The crate keyword refers to the current crate. Absolute paths begin with a crate name, where again the keyword crate refers to the current crate. A foo.rs and foo/ subdirectory may coexist. mod.rs is no longer required when placing submodules in a subdirectory. Anonymous trait parameters are deprecated Parameters in trait method declarations are no longer allowed to be anonymous. In Rust 2015, the following was allowed: trait Foo { fn foo(&self, u8); } In Rust 2018 RC1, all parameters require an argument name (even if it's just _): trait Foo { fn foo(&self, baz: u8); } Non-lexical lifetimes The borrow checker has been enhanced to accept more code. This is performed via a mechanism called ‘non-lexical lifetimes’. Previously, the below code would have produced an error, but now it will compile just fine: fn main() { let mut x = 5; let y = &x; let z = &mut x; } Lifetimes follow "lexical scope". This means that the borrow from y is considered to be held until y goes out of scope at the end of main. This is the case even though y will never be used again in the code. The above code works fine, but in the older versions, the borrow checker was not able handle it. Installation To try and install Rust 2018 RC1 you need to install the Rust 1.30 beta toolchain. This beta is a little different from the normal beta, states the Rust Blog. > rustup install beta > rustc +beta --version rustc 1.30.0-beta.2 (7a0062e46 2018-09-19) The feature flags for Rust 2018 RC1 are turned on and can be used to report issues. These were only a select few changes. Other changes in this beta include Lifetime elison in impl, T: ‘a inference in structs, macro changes etc. For more information and details on the complete list of updates, read the Rust edition guide where the new features are marked as beta. Rust 1.29 is out with improvements to its package manager, Cargo Deno, an attempt to fix Node.js flaws, is rewritten in Rust Creating Macros in Rust [Tutorial]

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

LLVM is a collection of tools used to develop compiler front ends and back ends. LLVM 7.0.0 has now been released with new tools and features such as performance measurement, optimization and others. The Windows installer in LLVM 7.0.0 no longer includes a Visual Studio integration. Now, there is a new LLVM Compiler Toolchain Visual Studio extension on the Visual Studio Marketplace. This new integration method supports Visual Studio 2017. The libraries are renamed from 7.0 to 7. Note that this change also impacts downstream libraries like lldb. The LoopInstSimplify pass (-loop-instsimplify) is removed in this release. When using Windows x or w IR mangling schemes, symbols starting with ? are no longer mangled by LLVM. A new tool called llvm-exegesis has been added. This new tool automatically measures instruction scheduling properties and provides a principled way to edit scheduling models. Another new tool llvm-mca is a static performance analysis tool that uses information to statically predict the performance of machine code for a specific CPU. The optimization of floating-point casts is also improved. It provides optimized results for code that relies on the undefined behavior of overflowing casts. The optimization feature is on by default and can be disabled by specifying a function attribute: "strict-float-cast-overflow"="false" This attribute can be created by the clang option -fno-strict-float-cast-overflow. To detect affected patterns code sanitizers can be used. The clang option for detecting only this problem alone is -fsanitize=float-cast-overflow. A demonstration is as follows: int main() {  float x = 4294967296.0f;  x = (float)((int)x);  printf("junk in the ftrunc: %f\n", x);  return 0; } And the clang options is run: clang -O1 ftrunc.c -fsanitize=float-cast-overflow ; ./a.out ftrunc.c:5:15: runtime error: 4.29497e+09 is outside the range of representable values of type 'int' junk in the ftrunc: 0.000000 LLVM_ON_WIN32 is no longer set by files in llvm/Config/config.h and llvm/Config/llvm-config.h. If you have used this macro before, now use the compiler-set _WIN32 instead, which is set exactly when LLVM_ON_WIN32 used to be set. The DEBUG macro has been renamed to LLVM_DEBUG, but the interface remains the same. SmallVector<T, 0> is shrunk from sizeof(void*) * 4 + sizeof(T) to sizeof(void*) + sizeof(unsigned) * 2. It is smaller than std::vector<T> on 64-bit platforms. The maximum capacity for it is now restricted to UINT32_MAX. Experimental support is added for DWARF v5 debugging. This includes the new .debug_names accelerator table. The opt tool supports the -load-pass-plugin option to load pass plugins for the new PassManager. Support is added for profiling JIT-ed code with perf. In LLVM 7.0.0 support for the .rva assembler directive for COFF targets is added. For Windows, the llvm-rc tool has also received minor upgrades. There are still some known missing features but it should be usable in most cases. On request, CodeView debug info can now be emitted for MinGW configurations. There are also changes to variety of targets like AArch64 Target, ARM, x86 among others. For a complete list of updates, visit the LLVM website. JUnit 5.3 brings console output capture, assertThrow enhancements and parallel test execution Mastodon 2.5 released with UI, administration, and deployment changes ReSharper 18.2 brings performance improvements, C# 7.3, Blazor support and spellcheck

The Electron team announced the first stable release Electron 3.0.0, yesterday. Electron 3.0.0 comes with upgrades, fixes, and other changes. Electron is a framework which helps create native cross-platform applications with web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Let’s see what’s new in Electron 3.0.0. New Features and changes There are two new features added in Electron 3.0.0, namely, TextField and Button APIs. However, these APIs are currently experimental and have been therefore turned off by default. You can enable these APIs with the enable_view_api build flag. The fs.readSync feature now works with massive files.  There’s a new netLog API added for dynamic logging control. Breaking API changes With Electron 3.0.0, updates have been made to menu item order control. The did-get-response-details and did-get-redirect-request events have been removed. JSON is no longer used to send the result of ipcRenderer.sendSync. The api::Window has been renamed to api::BrowserWindow. The app-command media-play_pause has been renamed to media-play-pause. macOS A new workspace notifications support has been added. There’s also a mouse forward functionality now on macOS. Windows A DIP has been added to/from screen coordinate conversions. Bug Fixes The issue with fs.statSyncNoException throwing exceptions has been fixed. The occurrence of a crash when loading site with jquery has been fixed. Also, the crash in net::ClientSocketHandle destructor has been fixed. Now, with Electron 3.0.0, the focus change will be notified right away rather than on next tick. macOS The context menu click callback has been fixed. The tray.setContextMenu crash has been resolved. Also, tray title crash has been fixed. The mac protocol that used to get set to none after calling app.removeAsDefaultProtocolClient, is resolved. Linux BrowserWindow.focus() for offscreen windows has been fixed. For more information on Electron 3.0.0, check out the official release notes. How to build a cross-platform desktop application with Node.js and Electron How to build a desktop app using Electron Web Scraping with Electron

Prior to news of Linus Torvalds self-imposed leave from the project, Linux leaders - including Torvalds - revised its Code of Conflict, moving instead to a Code of Conduct. A new Linux Code of Conduct was submitted by Greg Kroah-Hartman on Saturday 15 September. Kroah-Hartman wrote that "the Code of Conflict is not achieving its implicit goal of fostering civility and the spirit of 'be excellent to each other.'" Read the new Linux Code of Conduct here. The change was committed yesterday (16 September) by Torvalds. Other leading figures in the Linux project also put their names behind the move, including Olof Johansson and Steve Rostedt. It's not immediately clear to what extent the new Code of Conduct has something to do with Torvalds' hiatus, but it's impossible to avoid making a connection between the two. What's new in the Linux Code of Conduct? Linux's Code of Conflict has always felt combative. The naming makes clear that disagreement is part and parcel of open source development. It was always clear that "critique and criticism" were simply a part of what it means to be in the Linux community. "The Linux kernel development effort is a very personal process compared to "traditional" ways of developing software. Your code and ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed, often resulting in critique and criticism. The review will almost always require improvements to the code before it can be included in the kernel. Know that this happens because everyone involved wants to see the best possible solution for the overall success of Linux." By switching to a Code of Conduct, Linux is immediately placing emphasis on how contributors and maintainers work together to cultivate an open and safe community that people want to be involved in. Contrast this with the section from the Code of Conflict above: "In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation." The Code of Conduct then goes on to outline specific examples of what is and isn't acceptable. "Using welcoming and accepting language" and "showing empathy to other community members" are just two examples of how the code suggests community members can help to create a positive working environment. The new Code of Conduct then goes on to detail the responsibilities of Linux maintainers. They are presented as custodians or stewards for Linux. They are responsible for "clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior." The reaction to the new Linux Code of Conduct Reaction to the news - coupled with Linus Torvalds apology today - has caused considerable reaction on Twitter and across the open source community. For some, this is an example of politics entering into open source code - with some suggesting that it could be detrimental to the Linux project overall. Of course, the link between a more positive, inclusive and respectful community environment to a weaker project does seem strange to say the least. Taken alongside news last week that Python is dumping 'master' and 'slave' in its documentation, it would seem that we're starting to see open source projects take inclusivity and accessibility seriously. Some in the community might see that as a threat to them - but, if we really do think 'be excellent to each other' is the philosophy we should live by, shouldn't we do everything to make sure we're always held to that standard?

Node.JS is a popular backend widely for web development despite some of its flaws. For embedded systems, now there is low.js, a Node.js port with far lower system requirements. In low.js you can program JavaScript applications by utilizing the full Node.js API. You can run these on regular computers and also on embedded devices, which are based on the $3 ESP32 microcontroller. The JavaScript V8 engine at the center of Node.js is replaced with Duktape. Duktape is an embeddable ECMAScript E5/E5.1 engine with a compact footprint. Some parts of the Node.js system library are rewritten for more compact footprint and use more native code. low.js currently uses under 2 MB of disk space with a minimum requirement of around 1.5 MB of RAM for the ESP32 version. low.js features low.js is good for hobbyists and people interested in electronics. It allows using Node.JS scripts on smaller devices like routers which are based on Linux or uClinux without using much of the resources. This is great for scripting especially if they communicate over the internet. The neonious one is a microcontroller board based on low.js for ESP32, which can be programmed in JavaScript ES 6 with the Node API. It includes Wifi, Ethernet, additional flash and an extra I/O controller. The lower systems requirements in low.js allow you to run it comfortably on the ESP32-WROVER module. The ESP32-WROVER costs under $3 for large orders and is a very cost effective solution for IoT devices requiring a microcontroller and Wifi. low.js for ESP32 also adds the additional benefit of fast software development and maintenance. Specialized software developers are not needed for the microcontroller software. How to install? The community edition of low.js can be run on POSIX based systems including Linux, uClinux, and Mac OS X. It is available on Github and currently ./configure is not present. You might need some programming skills and knowledge to get low.js up and running on your systems. The commands are as follows: git clone https://github.com/neonious/lowjs cd lowjs git submodule update --init --recursive make low.js for ESP32 is the same as the community edition, but adapted for the ESP32 microcontroller. This version is not open source and is pre-flashed on the neonious one. For more information and documentation visit the low.js website. Deno, an attempt to fix Node.js flaws, is rewritten in Rust Node.js announces security updates for all their active release lines for August 2018 Deploying Node.js apps on Google App Engine is now easy

With JDK 11 reaching general availability next week, there is also a proposed schedule released for JDK 12. The proposed schedule indicates a final release in March 2019 along with two JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs) proposed for JDK 12. Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, made an announcement in a mail posted to the OpenJDK mailing list. Per the mail, JDK 12 should be out to the public on March 19, 2019. The proposed schedule for JDK 12 will be as follows: 13th December 2018 Rampdown Phase One 17th January 2019 Rampdown Phase Two 31st January 2019 Release-Candidate Phase 19th March 2019 General Availability JDK 11 had a total of 17 JEPs contributed out of which three were from the community, the highest number in any JDK release. The other 14 were from Oracle according to a tweet by @bellsoftware. For JDK 12, there are two JEPs integrated which will be available as a preview language feature and four candidate JEPs. JDK 12 preview features JEP 325: Switch Expressions (Preview) This JEP is going to allow the switch statement to be used as both statements and as an expression. Both forms can use either a “traditional” or “simplified” scoping and control flow behavior. The changes to the switch statement will simplify everyday coding. It will also pave the way for the use of pattern matching in switch. JEP 326: Raw String Literals (Preview) This JEP adds raw string literals to Java. A raw string literal can span many source code lines. It does not interpret escape sequences, such as \n, or Unicode escapes, of the form \uXXXX. This does not introduce any new String operators. There will be no change in the interpretation of traditional string literals. JDK 12 JEP candidates JEP 343: Packaging Tool To create a new tool based on the JavaFX javapackager tool for packaging self-contained Java applications. JEP 342: Limit Speculative Execution To help both developers and deployers to defend against speculative-execution vulnerabilities. This is to be done by providing a means to limit speculative execution and not a complete defense against all forms of speculative execution. JEP 340: One AArch64 Port, Not Two Remove all arm64 port related sources while retaining the 32-bit ARM port and the 64-bit AArch64 port. This will help focus on a single 64-bit ARM implementation and eliminate duplicate work to maintain two ports. JEP 341: Default CDS Archives Enhance the JDK build process to generate a class data-sharing (CDS) archive by using the default class list, on 64-bit platforms. The goal is to improve out-of-the-box startup time and eliminating the need for users to run -Xshare:dump to benefit from CDS. To know more details on the proposed schedule for JDK 12, visit the OpenJDK website. JEP 325: Revamped switch statements that can also be expressions proposed for Java 12 Mark Reinhold on the evolution of Java platform and OpenJDK No more free Java SE 8 updates for commercial use after January 2019

Yesterday, the Rust team announced next version release of their systems programming language, Rust 1.29. Users using the previous versions of Rust installed via rustup, can easily get this latest version by a simple command: $ rustup update stable This Rust 1.29 release has lesser features. This is because the 1.29 cycle was spent preparing for the upcoming releases, Rust 1.30 and 1.31 that will have a lot more features in them. What’s new in Rust 1.29? This stable release of Rust has two most important improvements to Cargo, Rust’s package manager. The new improvements include cargo fix can automatically fix your code that has warnings cargo clippy is a bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code cargo fix Rust 1.29 includes a new subcommand for Cargo known as cargo fix. This is the initial release of cargo fix that fixes a small number of warnings in the compiler. The compiler has an API for this, and it only suggests fixing lints that the team says, recommends correct code. Over time, cargo fix can be expanded based on user suggestions to automatically fix more warnings. cargo clippy Clippy has a large number of additional warnings that users can run against their Rust code. Users can now check out a preview of cargo clippy through Rustup, by the following command: $ rustup component add clippy-preview Clippy has not yet reached 1.0. However, its lints may change. The Rust team will release a clippy component once it has stabilized. Users can’t use clippy with cargo-fix yet, really. This is still in work in progress. Additional updates in Rust 1.29 The Rust version 1.29 also include some library stabilizations. The three APIs stabilized in this release are: Arc<T>::downcast Rc<T>::downcast Iterator::flatten Users can also compare &str and OsString. To have a detailed information on Rust 1.29, read its release notes. Deno, an attempt to fix Node.js flaws, is rewritten in Rust Working with Shared pointers in Rust: Challenges and Solutions [Tutorial] Rust Language Server, RLS 1.0 releases with code intelligence, syntax highlighting and more  

Python is set on changing its “master” and “slave” terminology in its documentation and code. This is to conciliate the people claiming the terminology as offensive. A python developer at Red Hat, Victor Stinner, started a discussion titled “avoid master/slave terminology” on Python bug report, last week. The bug report discusses changing "master" and "slave" in Python documentation to terms such as "parent", "worker", or something similar, based on the complaints received “privately”. “For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid ‘master’ and ‘slave’ terminology which can be associated to slavery” mentioned Victor Stinner in the bug report. Not every Python developer who participated in this discussion agreed with Victor Stinner. One of the developers in the discussion, Larry Hastings, wrote “I'm a little surprised by this.  It's not like slavery was acceptable when these computer science terms were coined and it's only comparatively recently that they've gone out of fashion. On the other hand, there are some areas in computer software where "master" and "slave" are the exact technical terms (e.g. IDE), and avoiding them would lead to confusion”. Another Python developer, Terry J. Reedy wrote, “To me, there is nothing wrong with the word 'master', as such. I mastered Python to become a master of Python. Purging Python of 'master' seems ill-conceived. Like Larry, I object to action based on hidden evidence”. Python is not the only one who has been under Scrutiny. The Redis community, Django, and Drupal all faced the same issue. Drupal changed the terms "master" and "slave" for "primary" and "replica". Similarly, Django swapped "master" and "slave" for "leader" and "follower". To put an end to this debate about the use of this politically incorrect language, Guido Van Rossum, who resigned as “Benevolent dictator for life” or BDFL in July, but is still active as a core developer, was pulled back in. Guido ended the discussion by saying, “I'm closing this now. Three out of four of Victor's PRs have been merged. The fourth one should not be merged because it reflects the underlying terminology of UNIX ptys. There's a remaining quibble about "pliant children" -> "helpers" but that can be dealt with as a follow-up PR without keeping this discussion open”. The final commit on this is as follows: bpo-34605, pty: Avoid master/slave terms * pty.spawn(): rename master_read parameter to parent_read * Rename pty.slave_open() to pty.child_open(), but keep an pty.slave_open alis to pty.child_open for backward compatibility * os.openpty(), os.forkpty(): rename master_fd/slave_fd to parent_fd/child_fd * Rename internal variables: * Rename master_fd/slave_fd to parent_fd/child_fd * Rename slave_name to child_name For more information on the discussion, be sure to check out the official Python bug report. Why Guido van Rossum quit as the Python chief (BDFL) No new PEPS will be approved for Python in 2018, with BDFL election pending Python comes third in TIOBE popularity index for the first time

Yesterday, the .NET community announced the second preview of .NET Core 2.2 and the Entity Framework 2.2. They also released C# version 7.3 and ML.NET 0.5. Let’s have a look at the highlights and features of each of these announcements. .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 can be used with Visual Studio 15.8, Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code. Following are two highlights of this release. Tiered Compilation Enabled The tiered compilation is enabled by default. The tiered compilation was available as part of the .NET Core 2.1 release. During that time, one had to enable tiered compilation via application configuration or an environment variable. It is now enabled by default and can be disabled, as needed. In the image below, the baseline is .NET Core 2.1 RTM, running in a default configuration, with tiered compilation disabled. The second scenario has tiered compilation. One can see a significant request-per-second (RPS) throughput benefit with tiered compilation enabled. The numbers in the chart are scaled so that baseline always measures 1.0. Such an approach makes it very easy to calculate performance changes as a percentage. The first two tests are TechEmpower benchmarks and the last one is Music Store, a frequent sample ASP.NET app. Platform Support .NET Core 2.2 is supported on the following operating systems: Windows Client: 7, 8.1, 10 (1607+) Windows Server: 2008 R2 SP1+ macOS: 10.12+ RHEL: 6+ Fedora: 27+ Ubuntu: 14.04+ Debian: 8+ SLES: 12+ openSUSE: 42.3+ Alpine: 3.7+ Read about the .NET Core 2.2 Preview 2 in detail, on Microsoft blog. Entity Framework Core 2.2 Preview 2 This preview includes a large number of bug fixes and two additional important previews, one is a data provider for Cosmos DB and the second one, new spatial extensions for .NET’s  SQL Server and in-memory providers. New EF Core provider for Cosmos DB This new provider enables developers (familiar with the EF programming model) to easily target Azure Cosmos DB as an application database. It also includes global distribution, elastic scalability, ‘always on’ availability, very low latency, and automatic indexing. Spatial extensions for SQL Server and in-memory This implementation picks the NetTopologySuite library that the PostgreSQL provider uses as the source of spatial .NET types. NetTopologySuite is a database-agnostic spatial library that implements standard spatial functionality using .NET idioms like properties and indexers. The extension then adds the ability to map and convert instances of these types to the column types supported by the underlying database, and usage of methods defined on these types in LINQ queries, to SQL functions supported by the underlying database. Read more about the Entity Framework Core 2.2 Preview 2 on the Microsoft blog. C# 7.3 C# 7.3 is the newest point release in the 7.0 family. Along with new compiler options, there are two main themes to the C# 7.3 release One provides features that enable safe code to be as performant as unsafe code. The second provides incremental improvements to existing features. New features that support the theme of better performance for safe code: Access to fixed fields without pinning. Easy Reassign ref local variables. Use of initializers on stackalloc arrays. Easy use of fixed statements with any type that supports a pattern. One can use additional generic constraints. The new compiler options in C# 7.3 are: -publicsign to enable Open Source Software (OSS) signing of assemblies. -pathmap to provide a mapping for source directories. Read more about the C# 7.3 in detail in its documentation notes. ML.NET 0.5 The .NET community released ML.NET version 0.5. ML.NET is a cross-platform, open source machine learning framework for .NET developers. This version release includes two key highlights: Addition of a TensorFlow model scoring transform (TensorFlowTransform) Starting from this version, the community plans to add support for Deep Learning in ML.NET. Following this, they introduced the TensorFlowTransform which enables taking an existing TensorFlow model, either trained by the user or downloaded from somewhere else, and get the scores from the TensorFlow model in ML.NET. This new TensorFlow scoring capability doesn’t require one to have a working knowledge of TensorFlow internal details. The implementation of this transform is based on code from TensorFlowSharp. One can simply add a reference to the ML.NET NuGet packages in thier .NET Core or .NET Framework apps. Under the covers, ML.NET includes and references the native TensorFlow library which allows writing code that loads an existing trained TensorFlow model file for scoring. New ML.NET API proposal exploration The new ML.NET API offers more flexible capabilities than what the current LearningPipeline API offers. The LearningPipeline API will be deprecated when this new API is ready. The new ML.NET API offers attractive features which aren’t possible with the current LearningPipeline API. These include: Strongly-typed API  takes advantage of C# capabilities. This helps errors to be discovered in compilation time along with improved Intellisense in the editors. Better flexibility: This new API provides a decomposable train and predict process, eliminating rigid and linear pipeline execution. Improved usability: This new API makes direct call to the APIs from user’s code. No more scaffolding or insolation layer creating an obscure separation between what the user/developer writes and the internal APIs. Entrypoints are no longer mandatory. Ability to simply score with TensorFlow models: One can also simply load a TensorFlow model and score by using it without needing to add any additional learner and training process. Better visibility of the transformed data: User’s have better visibility of the data while applying transformers. As this API inclusion will be a significant change in ML.NET, the community has started an open discussion where users can provide their feedback and help shape the long-term API for ML.NET. Users can share their feedback on ML.NET GitHub repo. Read more about ML.NET 0.5 in detail, on Microsoft blog. Task parallel library for easy multi-threading in .NET Core [Tutorial] Use App Metrics to analyze HTTP traffic, errors & network performance of a .NET Core app [Tutorial] Microsoft’s .NET Core 2.1 now powers Bing.com  

Git project released Git 2.19 earlier this week (September 10th, 2018). Git 2.19 brings more Python 3 compatibility work for git p4, a rewritten git submodule now implemented in C. Git Instaweb works better with newer versions of Apache. It also has a git range-diff feature, new capabilities in git grep, branch sorting changes, and a variety of other additions. Features in Git 2.19 A new ‘git range-diff’ tool Developers previously used the git rebase to rewrite history and polish their commits before making them public. git diff shows the difference between the two end states, but it doesn’t provide information about any of the individual commits. This version includes git range-diff, a tool for comparing two sequences of commits, including changes to their order, commit messages, and the actual content changes they introduce. Improvements in ‘git grep’ In Git 2.19 you can now locate the first matching column of your query with git grep --column. git grep also learned the new --only-matching option. This is useful if you have a non-trivial regular expression and want to gather only the matching parts of your search. A new ‘auto’ option The content-transfer-encoding of the message "git send-email" sends out by default was 8bit, which can cause trouble when there is an overlong line to bust RFC 5322/2822 limit.  A new option 'auto' to automatically switch to quoted-printable when there is such a line in the payload has been introduced and is made the default. The branch.sort option and other sorting options The git branch command, like git tag (and their scriptable counterpart, git for-each-ref), takes a --sort option to let you order the results by a number of properties. To show branches in the order of most recent update, you could use git branch --sort=-authordate. However, if you always prefer that order, typing that sort option can get tiresome. This version introduces the branch.sort config to set the default ordering of git branch. By default, git branch sorts by refname, hence master is first and newest is last. The other sorting options include: --sort=numparent shows the best merges. --sort=refname sorts branches alphabetically by their name. --sort=upstream sorts branches by the remote from which they originate. Other improvements in Git 2.19 ‘git submodule foreach’ has been largely rewritten in C. ‘git diff --color-moved’ feature has further improvised. The userdiff pattern for .php has been updated. ‘git instaweb’ has been adjusted to run better with newer Apache on RedHat based distros. Preparatory code to later add json output for telemetry data has been added. Read the complete updates and improvements in the Git 2.19 release notes. Microsoft announces Azure DevOps, makes Azure pipelines available on GitHub Marketplace Packt’s GitHub portal hits 2,000 repositories GitHub parts ways with JQuery, adopts Vanilla JS for its frontend

A new version of JUnit v5.3 was released last week. There are some changes and new features like parallel test execution, enhancements to AssertThrows, and others in this new version. JUnit is a popular unit testing framework for the Java which has been instrumental to the rise of test-driven development. Below are some of the key highlights of JUnit 5.3. Capturing output from a console It is now possible to capture System.out and System.err output using a TestExecutionListener in Junit 5.3. Capturing console output may not be a frequent need, but can become necessary in some cases such as when working on legacy code bases where statements are being written to console and viewing them can be useful. There are two steps to get this working, implementing a TestExecutionListener and configuring surefire to start capturing console output. Enhancements to AssertThrows The assertThrows assertion is updated to display the value a method returns. This works only if the method runs successfully and returns a value and no exception is thrown. It can be helpful for debugging a failing test case. Parallel test execution Parallel test execution is now enabled and can be configured via build files. This can be a pom.xml, build.gradle etc. The parallel test execution behavior can be changed at both, method and class levels with the annotations: @Execution and @ResourceLock. For detailed information on configuring and using parallel test execution in JUnit 5, check out the user guide. Other changes There are also some libraries and tools updated that are used with JUnit like filtering changes with native support, enhanced mockito dependency injection support, updates to AssertJ Soft Assertions and opentest4J. JUnit 5.3.1 was released on September 9, shortly after JUnit 5.3 and there are some minor fixes. There is another major change where variants of assertThrows() introduced in JUnit 5.3.0 that accepted ThrowingSupplier arguments are now removed. For a full list of bug fixes and changelogs, visit the JUnit website and to learn how to use the features, check out the user guide. Unit testing with Java frameworks: JUnit and TestNG [Tutorial] Unit Testing Apps with Android Studio Unit Testing in .NET Core with Visual Studio 2017 for better code quality

Python made it to the TIOBE index in the third position for the first time in its history. The TIOBE programming community index is a common measure of programming language popularity. It is created and maintained by the TIOBE company based in the Netherlands. The popularity in the index is calculated based on the number of search engine results for search queries with the name of the language. They consider searches from Google, Google Blogs, MSN, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia, and YouTube. The TIOBE index is updated once a month. Source: TIOBE Python is third behind Java and C. Python’s rating is 7.653 percent while Java had a rating of 17.436 percent. C was in the second place rated at 15.447 percent. Python moved above C++ to be placed third. C++ was third last month and now is in the fourth place this month, with a rating of 7.394 percent. Python has increasing ubiquity, being used in many research areas like AI and machine learning which are all the buzz today. The increasing popularity is not surprising as Python has versatile applications. AI and machine learning, software development, web development, scripting, scientific applications, and even games, you name it. Python is easy to install, learn, use, and deploy. The syntax is also very simple and beginner friendly. TIOBE states that this third place took a really took a long time. “At the beginning of the 1990s it entered the chart. Then it took another 10 years before it reached the TIOBE index top 10 for the first time. After that it slowly but surely approached the top 5 and eventually the top 3.“ Python has also been the language of the year in the index for the years 2007 and 2010. The current top 5 languages are Java, C, Python, C++, and Visual Basic .NET. To read more and to view the complete list of the index, visit the TIOBE website. Build a custom news feed with Python [Tutorial] Home Assistant: an open source Python home automation hub to rule all things smart Build botnet detectors using machine learning algorithms in Python [Tutorial]