Tech News - Languages

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

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?

Ruby 2.6.0 was released yesterday and brings a new JIT compiler. The new version also has the RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module. The new JIT compiler in Ruby 2.6.0 Ruby 2.6.0 comes with an early implementation of a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. The JIT compiler was introduced in Ruby to improve the performance of programs made with Ruby. Traditional JIT compilers operate in-process but Ruby’s JIT compiler gives out C code to the disk and generates a common C compiler to create native code. To enable the JIT compiler, you just need to specify --jit either on the command line or in the $RUBYOPT environment variable. Using --jit-verbose=1 will cause the JIT compiler to print additional information. The JIT compiler will work only when Ruby is built by GCC, Clang, or Microsoft Visual C++. Any of these compilers need to be available at runtime. On Optcarrot, a CPU intensive benchmark, Ruby 2.6 has 1.7x faster performance compared to Ruby 2.5. The JIT compiler, however, is still experimental and workloads like Rails might not benefit from for now. The RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module Ruby 2.6 brings the RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree module and the team does not guarantee any future compatibility of this module. The module has a parse method, which parses the given string as Ruby code and returns the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) nodes in the code. The given file is opened and parsed by the parse_file method as Ruby code, this returns AST nodes. A RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree::Node class—another experimental feature—is also introduced in Ruby 2.6.0. Developers can get source location and children nodes from the Node objects. To know more about other new features and improvements in detail, visit the Ruby 2.6.0 release notes. 8 programming languages to learn in 2019 Clojure 1.10 released with Prepl, improved error reporting and Java compatibility NumPy drops Python 2 support. Now you need Python 3.5 or later.

On Tuesday, Facebook mandates Visual Studio Code, the source code editor developed by Microsoft, as their default development environment. Additionally, they also stated that the company will work with Microsoft to expand the remote development extension for Visual Studio Code so that engineers can do large-scale remote development. As per the official announcement page, Facebook engineers have written millions of lines of codes and there is no mandated development environment. Till now Facebook developers used Vim or Emacs  and the development environment was disjointed. And certain developers also used Nuclide, an integrated development environment developed by Facebook. But in late 2018, they announced to their internal engineers that they would move Nuclide to Visual Studio Code. They have also done plenty of development work to migrate the current Nuclide functionality, along with new features to Visual Studio Code and currently it is used extensively across the company in beta. Why Visual Studio Code? The Visual Studio Code is a very popular development tool, with great support from Microsoft and the open source community. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and has a robust and well-defined extension API that enables to continue building the important capabilities required for the large-scale development done at Facebook. The company believes that it is a platform on which they can safely bet their development platform future. They have also partnered with Microsoft for remote development. At present, Facebook engineers install Visual Studio Code on a local PC, but the actual development is done directly on the development server in the data center. Therefore, it aims to improve efficiency and productivity by making the code on the server accessible in a seamless and high-performance manner. The company believes that using remote extensions will provide many benefits like: Work with larger, faster, or more specialized hardware than what’s available on local machine Create tailored, dedicated environments for each project’s specific dependencies, without worrying about errors due to mixed or conflicting configurations Support the flexibility of being able to quickly switch between multiple running development environments without impacting local resources or tool performance Facebook mandates Visual Studio Code as an integrated development environment which can be used internally, specifically, because Facebook uses various programming languages. It also uses Mercurial as the source control infrastructure, it will work on the development of extensions to allow direct source control operations within Visual Studio Code. Facebook states, “VS Code is now an established part of Facebook’s development future. In teaming with Microsoft, we’re looking forward to being part of the community that helps Visual Studio Code continue to be a world class development tool.” On Hacker News, developers are discussing various issues related to remote development extensions in VS Code, one of them is it is not open-source and Facebook should take efforts to make it an open project. One comment reads, “Just an FYI for people - The Remote Development extensions are not open source. I'd hope if Facebook were joining efforts, they'd do so on a more open project. 1: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the... 2: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/wiki/Differences-between... 3: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/240 (aka, on-the-wire DRM to make sure the remote components only talk to a licensed VS Code build from Microsoft) MS edited the licensing terms many moons ago, to prepare for VS Code in browser using these remote extensions/apis that no one else can use)- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/48279 Finally, this is the thread where you will see regular users being negatively impacted by the DRM (a closed source, non-statically linked proprietary binary downloaded at runtime) that implements this proprietary-ness: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/10... (of course, also with enough details to potentially patch around this issue if you were so inclined). Further, MS acknowledged that statically linking would help in May, and yet it appears to still be an issue. I just hope they don't come after Eclipse Theia…” Microsoft releases Cascadia Code version 1909.16, the latest monospaced font for Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code 12 Visual Studio Code extensions that Node.js developers will love [Sponsored by Microsoft] 5 developers explain why they use Visual Studio Code [Sponsored by Microsoft] 5 useful Visual Studio Code extensions for Angular developers Facebook releases PyTorch 1.3 with named tensors, PyTorch Mobile, 8-bit model quantization, and more

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

Last week, Google brought the popular coding competitions Code Jam, HashCode and Kick Start together on a single website. This brand new UI will make the navigation better to make it user friendly. The user profile will now show notifications which will make the user experience better. Code Jam Google’s global coding competition, Code Jam, gives an opportunity to programmers around the world to solve tricky algorithmic puzzles. The first round includes three sub rounds. Next, the top 1,500 participants from each sub-round then get a chance to compete for a spot in round 2. Top 1,000 contestants are chosen out of them and they get an opportunity to move to the third round. Top 25 contestants will get selected from the third round and they will compete for the finals. The winners get the championship title and $15,000. HashCode HashCode is a team-based programming challenge organized by Google for students and professionals around the world. After registering for the contest, the participants will get an access to the Judge System. The Judge System is an online platform where one can form the team, join a hub, practice, and compete during the rounds. One can choose their team and programming language and the HashCode team assigns an engineering problem to the teams by live streaming on Youtube. The teams can compete either from a local hub or any another location of their choice. The selected teams will compete for the final round at Google’s office. Kick Start Kick Start, also a global online coding competition, consists of a variety of algorithmic challenges designed by Google engineers. Participants can either participate in one of the online rounds or in all of them. The top participants will get a chance to be interviewed at Google. The best part about KickStart is that it is open to all participants and there is no pre-qualification needed. If you are competing in a coding competition for the first time, then KickStart is the best option. What can you expect with this unified interface? Some good competition and some amazing insights coming from each of the rounds. Personalized certificate of completion. A chance to practice coding and experience new challenges A lot of opportunities To stay updated with the registration dates and details, one can sign up on Google’s coding competition’s official page. To know more about the competitions, check out Google’s blog. Google hints shutting down Google News over EU’s implementation of Article 11 or the “link tax” Recode Decode #GoogleWalkout interview shows why data and evidence don’t always lead to right decisions in even the world’s most data-driven company Google Dart 2.1 released with improved performance and usability

The switch from Python 2 to Python 3 has been rocky and all signs point to Python 3 pulling firmly into the lead. Python 3 is broadly compatible with several libraries and there's an encouraging rate of adoption by cloud providers for application support too as Python 2 reaches its EOL in 2020. But there are still plenty of efforts to keep Python 2 alive in one form or another. The default implementation of Python is open source, so it can easily be forked and maintained separately. Currently all major open source Python packages support Python 3.x and Python 2.7. Last year Python team updated users that Python 2.7 maintenance will stop in 2020. Originally, there was no official date but in March 2018, the team announced the date to be January 1, 2020. https://twitter.com/ThePSF/status/1160839590967685121 This means that the maintainers of Python 2 will stop supporting it even for security patches. There are many institutions and codebases who have not yet ported their code from Python 2 to Python 3. Hence, Python volunteers have created resources to help publicize and educate, but there's still more work that needs to be done. For which the Python Software Foundation has contracted with Changeset Consulting, to help communicate about the sunsetting of Python 2. The high-level goal for Changeset's involvement is to help users through the end of the transition, help with communication so volunteers are not overwhelmed, and help update public-facing assets so core developers are not overwhelmed. This will also require all the major Python projects to migrate to Python 3 and above. However, PyPy confirmed last week that they do not plan to deprecate Python 2.7 support as long as PyPy exists, according to the official Twitter statement. https://twitter.com/pypyproject/status/1160209907079176192 Apart from this, PyPy runtime is popular among developers due to its built-in JIT which provides major speed boosts to Python code. Pypy has long favored Python 2 over Python 3. This favoritism isn't solely because the first versions of PyPy were Python 2 implementations and Python 3 has only recently entered the picture. It's also due to a key part of PyPy's ecosystem, RPython which is a dynamic language implementation framework has its foundation in Python 2. This is not likely to change, according to PyPy's official FAQ. The page states, “the Python 2 version of PyPy will be around 'forever', i.e. as long as PyPy itself is around.” According to Pypy’s official announcement it will support Python 3 while continuing to support Python 2.7 version. Last year when Python rolled out the announcement that Python 2 will officially end in 2020, users on Hacker News discussed about the most popular packages being compatible with Python 3 while millions of people in the industry still work on Python 2.7. One of the users comments read, “most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3 I often see this but I think it's a perception from the Internet/web world. I work for CGI, all (I'm not kidding) our software (we have many) are 2.7. You will never see them used "on the web/Internet/forum/network" place but the day-to-day job of millions of people in the industry is 2.7. And we are a tiny focused industry. So I'm sure there are many other industries like us which are 2.7 that you never heard of. That's why "most popular" mean nothing once you take how Python is used as a whole. We don't use any of this web/Internet/network "popular" packages. I'm not saying Python shouldn't move on. I'm just trying to argue against this "most popular packages" while millions of us, even if you don't know it, use none of those. GNU Radio 3.8.0.0 releases with new dependencies, Python 2 and 3 compatibility, and much more! NumPy 1.17.0 is here, officially drops Python 2.7 support pushing forward Python 3 adoption Python 3.8 new features: the walrus operator, positional-only parameters, and much more

Yesterday, the team behind Python posted details about the sunsetting of Python 2. As announced before, post January 1, 2020, Python 2 will not be maintained by the Python team. This means that it will no longer receive new features and it will not be improved even if a security problem is found in it. https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1170949978036084736 Why is Python 2 retiring? In the detailed post, the Python team explains that the huge alterations needed in Python 2 led to the birth of Python 3 in 2006. To keep users happy, the Python team kept improving and publishing both the versions together. However, due to some changes that Python 2 couldn’t  handle and scarcity of time required to improve Python 3 faster, the Python team has decided to sunset the second version. The team says, “So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015, and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not. So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020.” The Python team has clearly stated that January 1, 2020 onwards, they will not upgrade or improve the second version of Python even if a fatal security problem crops up in it. Their advice to Python 2 users is to switch to Python 3 using the official porting guide as the former will not support many tools in the future. On the other hand, Python 3 supports graph for all the 360 most popular Python packages. Users can also check out the ‘Can I Use Python 3?’ to find out which tools need to upgrade to Python 3. Python 3 adoption has begun As the end date of Python has been decided earlier on, many implementations of Python have already dropped support for Python 2 or are supporting both Python 2 and 3 for now. Two months ago, NumPy, the library for Python programming language officially dropped support for Python 2.7 in its latest version NumPy 1.17.0. It will only support Python versions 3.5 – 3.7. Earlier this year, pandas 0.24 stopped support for Python 2. Pandas maintainer, Jeff Reback had said, “It's 2019 and Python 2 is slowly trickling out of the PyData stack.” However, not all projects are yet fully on board. There has also been efforts taken to keep Python 2 alive. In August this year, PyPy announced that that they do not plan to deprecate Python 2.7 support as long as PyPy exists. https://twitter.com/pypyproject/status/1160209907079176192 Many users are happy to say goodbye to the second version of Python in favor of building towards a long term vision. https://twitter.com/mkennedy/status/1171132063220502528 https://twitter.com/MeskinDaniel/status/1171244860386480129 A user on Hacker News comments, “In 2015, there was no way I could have moved to Python 3. There were too many libraries I depended on that hadn't ported yet. In 2019, I feel pretty confident about using Python 3, having used it exclusively for about 18 months now. For my personal use case at least, this timeline worked out well for me. Hopefully it works out for most everyone. I can't imagine they made this decision without at least some data backing it up.” Head over to the Python website for more details about about this news. Latest news in Python Introducing OpenDrop, an open-source implementation of Apple AirDrop written in Python Poetry, a Python dependency management and packaging tool, releases v1 beta 1 with URL dependency Łukasz Langa at PyLondinium19: “If Python stays synonymous with CPython for too long, we’ll be in big trouble”

Dr. Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang passed away over the weekend at the age of 68. Dr. Armstrong’s wife specified that he died from an infection of the lungs which occurred due to a quite recent diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. His lungs were donated to lung research. Francesco Cesarini, founder of Erlang solutions tweeted about Joe’s demise. https://twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/1119596234166218754 Robert Virding, co-creator of Erlang also payed his regards. https://twitter.com/rvirding/status/1119610591885307904 The developer community has also mourned the loss of Joe Armstrong with a large number of developers taking to various social media platforms to offer their condolences to Dr. Armstrong's family and paying their respects for him. Dr. Armstrong’s work with concurrency programming Dr. Armstrong was best known for helping lay foundations in the '70s and '80s to the most widely spread concurrency models as we know them today. In concurrent programming, multiple events, code snippets or programs are perceived to be executing at the same time. Unlike imperative languages, which uses routines or object-oriented languages, which use objects. Concurrency oriented languages use processes, actors, and agents as the main building blocks. Dr. Armstrong helped propel concurrency programming at a time when there was no IoT, web, massive multi-user online games, video streaming, and automated trading or online transactions. The Erlang programming language Erlang was co-created by Joe Armstrong alongside Robert Virding and Mike Williams in the 1980s at the Ericsson Computer Science Labs. While working there, Dr. Armstrong and his colleagues were looking for an approach to developing fault-tolerant and scalable systems. This resulted in the Erlang-style concurrency. He later received a Ph. D. in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003. He is also the author of a number of key books on the topic of Erlang including Concurrent Programming in Erlang, Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World, and Coders At Work. Erlang was originally built for use only at Ericsson, as a proprietary language, to improve telephony applications. It was designed to be a fault-tolerant, distributed, real-time system that offered pattern matching and functional programming in one handy package. It was then open-sourced to the public in 1998. Since then, it has been responsible for business, big and small, to create reliable systems. Since then, Erlang has been one of the most popular open source languages with compelling features like concurrent processes, memory management, scheduling, distribution, networking, etc. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform’s server is almost completely implemented in Erlang. In 2018, Erlang celebrated 20 years of its open sourcing tracing its journey from Ericcson to Whatsapp. Erlang also inspired Elixir, a general-purpose programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir is built on top of Erlang and shares the same abstractions for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. Using Erlang modules in Elixir has helped in the creation of Nerves, which helps in building embedded software, and the web framework Phoenix. Remembering Dr. Joe Armstrong Many developers have shared their sentiments on Dr. Armstrong’s demise, with most of them describing him as a kind and compassionate developer who was more interested in teaching than his ego. Thomas Gebert, a software developer shared an email thread where he asked Joe Armstrong about concurrency. He states, “Dr. Armstrong’s enthusiasm about Erlang, distributed programming, and pretty much everything else about computers was really a good springboard for self-education.” Even though Thomas asked some serious noobie questions about concurrency, Dr. Armstrong responded back with an incredibly long, well-written email explaining a lot of the minutia of how Erlang avoids a lot of pitfalls and generic concurrency theory. Thomas adds, “He was really good about explaining things in a way simple-enough for me to understand, without coming off as patronizing or rude.” A lot of people also took to Twitter to share their experiences working with Dr. Armstrong. https://twitter.com/zxq9_notits/status/1119602063506206725 https://twitter.com/glv/status/1119706037689491456 https://twitter.com/ktosopl/status/1119612076190601217 https://twitter.com/jboner/status/1119651034933100544 “He and I discussed distributed storage. Well detailed response from him that sent me reading for days. I aspire to be like him.” reads a comment on Hacker News. Such was his popularity. Here are some of his memorable quotes on a varied set of topics of interest to him. “All significant energy gains in the last 50 odd years are the result of new hardware NOT software.” https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1115988725111169025 Prediction: One day computers might become useful https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1114558139217711104 “One on the disadvantages of having a PhD in computer science is that I get asked really difficult questions. Like - "In gmail on my iPhone I press archive - can I get my mail back?" and "Why have they changed the interface?" Why no easy questions like what's a monad?” https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1113847695612022785 The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation launched at the Code BEAM SF conference Elixir 1.7, the programming language for Erlang virtual machine, releases Introducing Mint, a new HTTP client for Elixir

Yesterday, the PHP development team announced the availability of PHP version 7.4. This marks the fourth feature update to the PHP 7 series. PHP 7.4 comes with numerous improvements and new features. Key features in PHP 7.4 Class properties support type declarations. Starting from PHP 7.4, arrow functions will provide a shorthand syntax for defining functions with implicit by-value scope binding The full variance support is only available if autoloading is used by the user. Also, a single file will now only support non-cyclic type references. Numeric literals can contain underscores between digits. Weak references in PHP 7.4 will allow the programmers to retain a reference to an object that does not prevent the object from being destroyed. Users can now throw exceptions from __toString(). This was previously not permitted in PHP as it used to result in a fatal error. The CURLFile now supports stream wrappers in addition to plain file names. The FILTER_VALIDATE_FLOAT filter will support the min_range and max_range options, with the same semantics as FILTER_VALIDATE_INT. A new FFI extension is introduced. It will provide a simple way to call native functions, access native variables, and create/access data structures defined in C libraries. A new IMG_FILTER_SCATTER image filter is added to introduce a scatter filter to images. Read More: The Union Types 2.0 proposal gets a go-ahead for PHP 8.0 Users are happy with the new features in PHP 7.4 release. https://twitter.com/heiglandreas/status/1199989039249678337 To know the full list of changes, head over to the PHP archive page. Users can also check out the PHP manual to learn how to migrate from PHP 7.3.x to PHP 7.4.x. PEAR’s (PHP Extension and Application Repository) web server disabled due to a security breach Symfony leaves PHP-FIG, the framework interoperability group Google App Engine standard environment (beta) now includes PHP 7.2 Redox OS will soon permanently run rustc, the compiler for the Rust programming language, says Redox creator Jeremy Soller Homebrew 2.2 releases with support for macOS Catalina

Yesterday, Diane Hosfelt, a Research Engineer at Mozilla, shared what she and her team experienced when rewriting Firefox internals in Rust. Taking Quantum CSS as a case study, she touched upon the potential security vulnerabilities that could have been prevented if it was written in Rust from the very beginning. Why Mozilla decided to rewrite Firefox internal in Rust? Quantum CSS is a part of Mozilla’s Project Quantum, under which it is rewriting Firefox internals to make it faster. One of the major parts of this project is Servo, an engine designed to provide better concurrency and parallelism. To achieve these goals Mozilla decided to rewrite Servo in Rust, replacing C++. Rust is very similar to C++ in some ways while being different in terms of the abstractions and data structures it uses. It was created by Mozilla keeping concurrency safety in mind. Its type and memory-safe property make programs written in Rust thread-safe. What type of bugs does Rust prevent? Overall Rust prevents bugs related to memory, bounds, null/uninitialized variables, or integer by default. Hosfelt mentioned in her blog post, “Due to the overlap between memory safety violations and security-related bugs, we can say that Rust code should result in fewer critical CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).” However, there are some types of bugs that Rust does not address like correctness bugs. According to Hosfelt, Rust is a good option in the following cases: When your program involves processing of untrusted input safely When you want to use parallelism for better performance When you are integrating isolated components into an existing codebase You can go through the blog post by Diane Hosfelt on Mozilla’s website. Mozilla shares key takeaways from the Design Tools survey Mozilla partners with Scroll to understand consumer attitudes for an ad-free experience on the web Mozilla partners with Ubisoft to Clever-Commit its code, an artificial intelligence assisted assistant

In the annual Go user survey, the three top requests made by users for Go version 2 were better package management, error handling and the inclusion of generics. Following these requests, the Go 2 draft designs were shared yesterday to include error handling, error values, and adding generics. Note that these are not official proposals. The features, error handling and generics are in step 2 according to the Go release cycle, shown as follows. Source: Go Blog Yesterday, Google developer Russ Cox, gave a talk on design drafts for Golang 2. Go 2 draft designs were also previewed at Gophercon 2018. In his talk, he mentions that the current boilerplate contains too much code for error checks and that the error reporting is not precise enough. For example, an error while using os.Open in which the name of the file which cannot be opened, isn’t mentioned. As proper error reporting only adds to the code, most programmers don’t really bother with this despite knowing that such a practice may create confusion. The new idea, therefore, aims to add a check expression to shorten the checks while keeping them explicit. Cox also stresses on adding experience reports. These reports are difficult but necessary to implement new features. Experience reports turn abstract problems into concrete ones and are needed for changes to be implemented in Golang. They serve as a test case for evaluating a proposed solution and its effects on real-life use-cases. Regarding the inclusion of Generics, Cox mentions: “I've been examining generics recently, but I don't have in my mind a clear picture of the detailed, concrete problems that Go users need generics to solve. As a result, I can't answer a design question like whether to support generic methods, which is to say methods that are parameterized separately from the receiver. If we had a large set of real-world use cases, we could begin to answer a question like this by examining the significant ones.” Go 2 is not going to be a single release, but a sequence of releases adding features as and when they are ready. The approach is to first make features backward compatible to Go 1. Minor changes could be seen in Go 1 in a year or so. If there are no backward incompatible changes, Go 1.20 may be just declared as Go 2. The conversation for Go 2 has started, and there is a call for community help and contribution to converting the drafts into official proposals. Visit the Go page and the GitHub repository for more details. Why Golang is the fastest growing language on GitHub Golang 1.11 is here with modules and experimental WebAssembly port among other updates GoMobile: GoLang’s Foray into the Mobile World

Last week, Microsoft open-sourced its implementation of the C++ Standard Library, also known as STL. The library is shipped along with MSVC (Microsoft Visual C++ compiler) toolset and the Visual Studio IDE. This announcement was made by MSVC team at the CppCon 2019 conference, two days ago. Users can use the C++ library repo for participating in the STL's development by reporting issues and commenting on pull requests. The MSVC team is still working on migrating the C++ Standard Library to GitHub. Currently, the Github repository contains all of MSVC's product source code including a new CMake build system and a README. The team also plans to use the GitHub issues to track C++20 features, LWG issues, conformance bugs, performance improvements, and other todos. The roadmap and iteration plans of the C++ Standard Library is also under progress. Why Microsoft open-sourced the C++ Standard Library? Microsoft has open-sourced STL to allow it’s users easy access to all the latest developments in C++ by trying out latest changes and improving pull requests by reviewing them. The MSVC team hopes that as C++ standardization accelerates, it will be easier for users to accept the major features. Microsoft chose to open-source STL particularly due to its unique design and fast-evolving nature when compared to other MSVC libraries and compiler. It is also “easy to contribute to, and somewhat loosely coupled, unlike the compiler.” The official blog post adds, “We also want to contribute back to the C++ community by making it possible to take our implementations of major features.” What are the primary goals of the C++ Standard Library? Microsoft is implementing the latest C++ Working Draft, which will eventually become the next C++ International Standard. The goals of the Microsoft C++ Standard Library are to be conformant to spec, extremely fast, usable, and extensive compatibility. Speed being the core strength of C++, STL needs to be extremely fast at runtime. Thus, the MSVC team spends more time on the optimization of the C++ Standard Library than the most general-purpose libraries. They are also working on parts of the programming experience like compiler throughput, diagnostic messages, and debugging checks. They are also keeping VS 2019 binary-compatible with VS 2017 and VS 2015. They consider source compatibility to be important, but not all-important; breaking source compatibility can be an acceptable cost if done for the right reasons in the right way. The blog post states that MSVC’s STL is distributed under the Apache License v2.0 with LLVM Exceptions and is distinct from the libc++ library. However, if any libc++’s maintainers are interested in taking feature implementations from MSVC’s STL or in collaborating on the development of new features in both libraries simultaneously, the MSVC team will help irrespective of the licensing. Users have welcomed Microsoft’s move to open-source it’s C++ Standard Library (STL). A Redditor says, “Thank you! Absolutely amazing. It's been one of my guilty pleasures ever since I started with C++ to prod about in your internals to see how stuff works so this is like being taken to the magical chocolate factory for me.” Another user comments, “thank you for giving back to the open source world. ❤🤘” Interested readers can learn how to build with the Native Tools Command Prompt and a Visual Studio IDE on Github. Latest news in Tech Open AI researchers advance multi-agent competition by training AI agents in a simple hide and seek environment As Kickstarter reels in the aftermath of its alleged union-busting move, is the tech industry at a tipping point? Linux 5.3 releases with support for AMD Navi GPUs, Zhaoxin x86 CPUs and power usage improvements

C# 8.0 will introduce some new features and will likely ship out the same time as .NET Core 3.0. Developers will be able to use the new features with Visual Studio 2019. Nullable reference types in C# 8.0 This feature aims to help prevent the null reference exceptions that appear everywhere. They have riddled object-oriented programming for half a century now. The null reference exceptions stop developers from using null in ordinary reference types like string. They make these types non-nullable. They are warnings, however, not errors. On existing code, there will be new warnings. Developers will have to opt into using the new feature at the project, file, or source line level. C# 8.0 will let you express your “nullable intent”, and throws a warning when you don’t follow it. string s = null; // Warning: Assignment of null to non-nullable reference type string? s = null; // Ok Asynchronous streams with IAsyncEnumerable<T> The async feature that was from C# 5.0 lets developers consume and produce asynchronous results. This is in straightforward code, without callbacks. This isn’t helpful when developers want to consume or produce continuous streams of results. For example, data from an IoT device or a cloud service. Async streams are present for this use. C# 8.0 will come with IAsyncEnumerable<T>. It is an asynchronous version of the existing IEnumerable<T>. Now you can await foreach over functions to consume their elements, then yield return to them in order to produce elements. async IAsyncEnumerable<int> GetBigResultsAsync() {    await foreach (var result in GetResultsAsync())    {        if (result > 20) yield return result;    } } Ranges and indices A type Index is added which can be used for indexing. A type index can be created from an int that counts from the beginning. It can be alternatively created with a prefix ^ operator that counts from the end. Index i1 = 3;  // number 3 from beginning Index i2 = ^4; // number 4 from end int[] a = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 }; Console.WriteLine($"{a[i1]}, {a[i2]}"); // "3, 6" C# 8.0 will have an added Range type consisting of two Indexes. One will be for the start and one for the end. They can be written with an x..y range expression. Default implementations of interface members Currently, once an interface is published members can’t be added anymore without breaking all its existing implementers. With the new release, a body for an interface member can be provided. If somebody doesn’t implement that member, the default implementation will be available instead. Allowing recursive patterns C# 8.0 will allow patterns to contain other patterns. IEnumerable<string> GetEnrollees() {    foreach (var p in People)    {        if (p is Student { Graduated: false, Name: string name }) yield return name;    } } The pattern in the above code checks that the Person is a Student. It then applies the constant pattern false to their Graduated property to see if they’re still enrolled. Then checks if the pattern string name to their Name property to get their name. Hence, if p is a Student who has not graduated and has a non-null name, that name will yield return. Switch expressions Switch statements with patterns a powerful feature in C# 7.0. But since they can be cumbersome to write, the next C# version will have switch expressions. They are a lightweight version of switch statements, where all the cases are expressions. Target-typed new-expressions In many cases, on creating a new object, the type is already given from context. C# 8.0 will let you omit the type in those cases. For more details, visit the Microsoft Blog. ReSharper 18.2 brings performance improvements, C# 7.3, Blazor support and spellcheck Qml.Net: A new C# library for cross-platform .NET GUI development Microsoft announces .NET standard 2.1