Tech News - Programming

Last week, the team behind GNU Radio announced the release of GNU Radio 3.8, a free and open-source software development toolkit. GNU Radio 3.8.0.0 comes with a few major changes and deprecations. Major changes in GNU Radio 3.8.0.0 Dependencies With this release, new dependencies have been introduced including MPIR/GMP, Qt5, codec2, gsm. The team has removed few of the dependencies including libusb, Qt4, and CppUnit Python compatibility This release is Python 2 and Python 3 compatible. Also, GNU Radio 3.8 is going to be the last Py2k-compatible release series. Gengen got replaced Gengen (GENerator GENerator) a tool that generates a text generator got replaced by templates. gnuradio-runtime The team has reworked on fractional tag time handling which is in the context of resamplers C++ generation In this release, C++ generation has been introduced as an option. gr-utils The gr_modtool has also improved now. Some deprecations in GNU Radio 3.8  Modules Modules gr-comedi, gr-fcd and gr-wxgui have been removed. Gr-comedi Gr-comedi has been removed as it had 0 active code contributions in the 3.7 lifecycle. gr-fcd Gr-fcd is getting removed as it is currently untestable by the CI and as there were no code contributions. It seems few users are excited to experiment with GNU Radio 3.8 in the near future. A user commented on HackerNews, “GNU Radio is one of those examples of free software being hyper-niche yet super successful. It's something I want to start playing with in the near future.” To know more about this news, check out the official post by GNURadio. GNU C Library version 2.30 releases with POSIX-proposed functions, support for Unicode 12.1.0, new Linux functions and more! GNU APL 1.8 releases with bug fixes, FFT, GTK, RE and more Debian 10 codenamed ‘buster’ released, along with Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 as a port    

Last week, the team at Telegram, the messaging app, introduced new features for group admins and users. These features include Slow Mode switch, custom titles, features for videos, and much more. What’s new in Telegram? Admins get more authority to manage the group  Slow Mode switch The Slow Mode feature will allow the group admin to control how often a member could send a message in the group. Once the admin enables Slow Mode in a group, the users will be able to send one message per the interval they choose. Also, a timer will be shown to the users which would tell them how long they need to wait before sending their next message. This feature is introduced to make group conversations more orderly and also to raise the value of each individual message. The official post suggests admins to “Keep it (Slow Mode feature) on permanently, or toggle as necessary to throttle rush hour traffic.” Image Source: Telegram Custom titles Group owners will now be able to set custom titles for admins like ‘Meme Queen’, ‘Spam Hammer’ or ‘El Duderino’. These custom titles will be shown with the default admin labels. For adding a custom title, users need to edit admin's rights in Group Settings. Image Source: Telegram Silent messages Telegram has now planned to bring more peace of mind to its users by introducing a feature that allows its users to message friends without any sound. Users just have to hold the send button to have any message or media delivered. New feature for videos Videos shared on Telegram now show thumbnail previews as users scroll through the videos to help them find the moment they were looking for. If users add a timestamp like 0:45 to a video caption, it will be automatically highlighted as a link. Also, if a user taps on a timestamp the video will play from the right spot.  Comments widget The team has come up with a new tool called Comments.App for users to comment on channel posts. With the help of the comments widget, users can log in with just two taps and comment with text and photos, as well as like, dislike and further reply to comments from others. Few users are excited about this news and appreciate Telegram over Whatsapp because it provides by default end to end encryption. A user commented on HackerNews, “I really like Telegram. Only end-to-end encryption by default and in group chats would make it perfect.” To know more about this news, check out the official post by Telegram. Telegram faces massive DDoS attack; suspects link to the ongoing Hong Kong protests Hacker destroys Iranian cyber-espionage data; leaks source code of APT34’s hacking tools on Telegram Trick or a treat: Telegram announces its new ‘delete feature’ that deletes messages on both the ends

Last week, Ubuntu announced that the upcoming Ubuntu version 19.10 will support ZFS as a root file system, and should be used as an ‘experimental’ installer. The ZFS support will enable an easy to use interface, provide automated operations and offer high flexibility to Ubuntu users. Initially, Ubuntu 19.10 will be supported on desktop only, however, the layout has been kept extensible for servers, later on. Ubuntu has also warned users not to use ZFS on production systems yet; users can use it for experimental purposes and provide feedback. Ubuntu develops a new user space daemon - ‘zsys’ In order to make the basic and advanced concepts of ZFS easily accessible and transparent to users, Ubuntu is developing a new user space daemon, called zsys, which is a ZFS system tool. It will allow multiple ZFS systems to run in parallel on the same machine, and have other advantages like automated snapshots, separating user data from system and persistent data to manage complex zfs dataset layouts. Ubuntu is designing the system in such a way that people with little knowledge of ZFS will also be able to use it flexibly. Zsys’s cooperation with GRUB and ZFS on Linux initramfs will yield advanced features which will be made official by Ubuntu, later on. Users can check out the current progress and what’s next with zsys on the Ubuntu projects Github page. Progress update of Ubuntu 19.10 ZFS has already been shipped on Linux version 0.8.1. It supports features like native encryption, trimming support, checkpoints, raw encrypted zfs transmissions, project accounting and quota and many performance enhancements. Some post-release upstream fixes has been backported, to provide a better user experience and increase reliability. A new support has been added in the GNU GRUB menu. All existing ZFS on root user can enjoy these benefits, as soon as version Ubuntu 19.10 is updated. The post states that “We still have a lot to tackle and 19.10 will be only the beginning of the journey. However, the path forward is exciting and we hope to be able to bring something fresh and unique to ZFS users.” Users are very happy with Ubuntu 19.10 supporting ZFS. https://twitter.com/jtteag/status/1159143800821952514 A user on Hacker News comments, “Having been a ZFS fan since the twilight of OpenSolaris, I'm very glad to see ZoL taking off. Rolling it into Ubuntu and making it officially supported was a great move - after some frustration with trying to run ZFS on a CentOS box and having it occasionally break after a kernel update, having it easily available on Ubuntu was like a breath of fresh air. Having it readily available as a root filesystem, and having TRIM support at long last, is great news.” While few users are not happy with Ubuntu 19.10 supporting ZFS due to its high maintenance. A Redditor says, “I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, use it on one of my own machines and recommend it to people. But almost every time they have decided to go it alone and make something a unique selling point it has backfired (Upstart, Mir, Unity, bzr, CouchDB, Ubuntu one). No other mainstream distro is going to adopt ZFS. Probably ubuntu will drop it in a few years when they realize they can't carry the maintenance burden. If you use ZFS for your file system then you won't be able to use standard recovery tools or access it from a dual boot. You won't be able to revert back to and older ubuntu version. You won't be able to install upstream kernels.” For more details, head over to the Ubuntu blog. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, was hacked; Ubuntu source code unaffected Ubuntu has decided to drop i386 (32-bit) architecture from Ubuntu 19.10 onwards Xubuntu 19.04 releases with latest Xfce package releases, new wallpapers and more

RacketCon 2019 happened last month from July 13 to 14 bringing together the Racket community to discuss ideas and future plans for the Racket programming language. Matthew Flatt, one of the core developers, graced the stage to give his talk: State of Racket. In his talk, he spoke about the growing community, performance improvements, and much more. He also touched upon his recommendation to change the surface syntax of Racket2, which has sparked a lot of discussion in the Racket community. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnz6y5U0tFs&t=390 Later in July, Greg Hendershott, who has contributed Racket projects like Rackjure and Travis-Racket and has driven a lot of community participation, expressed his concern about this change in a blog post. “I’m concerned the change won’t help grow the community; instead hurt it,“ he added. He further shared that he will shift his focus towards working on other programming languages, which implies that he is stepping down as a Racket contributor. Matthew Flatt recommends surface syntax change for removing technical barriers to entry There is no official proposal about this change yet, but Flatt has discussed it a couple of times. According to Flatt’s recommendation, Racket 2’s ‘lispy’ s-expressions should be changed to something which is not a barrier of entry to new users. He suggests to get rid or reduce the use of parentheses and bring infix operators, which means the operator sign will be written in between the operands, for instance, a + b.  “More significantly, parentheses are certainly an obstacle for some potential users of Racket. Given the fact of that obstacle, it's my opinion that we should try to remove or reduce the obstacle,“ Flatt writes in a mailing list. Racket is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is also an ecosystem for language-oriented programming. Flatt further explained his rationale behind suggesting this change that the current syntax is not only a hindrance to potential users of Racket as a programming language but also to those who want to use it as “a programming-language programming language”. He adds, “The idea of language-oriented programming (LOP) doesn't apply only to languages with parentheses, and we need to demonstrate that.” With this change, he hopes to make Racket2 more familiar and easier-to-accept for users outside the Racket community. Some Racket developers believe changing s-expressions based syntax is not “desirable” Many developers in the Racket community share a similar sentiment as Greg Hendershott. A user on Hacker News added, “Getting rid of s expressions without it being part of a more cohesive improvement (like better supporting a new type system or something) just for mainstream appeal seems like an odd choice to me.” Another user added, “A syntax without s-expressions is not an innovative feature. For me, it's not even desirable, not at all. When I'm using non-Lispy languages like Rust, Ada, Nim, and currently a lot of Go, that's despite their annoying syntactic idiosyncrasies. All of those quirky little curly braces and special symbols to save a few keystrokes. I'd much prefer if all of these languages used s-expressions. That syntax is so simple that it makes you focus on the semantics.” While others are more neutral about this suggested change. “To me, Flatt's proposal for Racket2 smells more like adding tools to better facilitate infix languages than deprecating S-expressions. Given Racket's pedagogical mission, it looks more like a move toward migrating the HtDP series of languages (Beginning Student, Intermediate Student, Intermediate Student with Lambda, and Advanced Student) to infix syntax than anything else. Not really the end of the world or a big change to the larger Racket community. Just another extension of an ecosystem that remains s-expression based despite Algol and Datalog shipping in the box,” a user expressed his opinion. To know more about this change, check out the discussion on Racket’s mailing list. Also, you can share your solutions on Racket2 RFCs. Racket 7.3 releases with improved Racket-on-Chez, refactored IO system, and more Racket 7.2, a descendant of Scheme and Lisp, is now out! Racket v7.0 is out with overhauled internals, updates to DrRacket, TypedRacket among others

Today, Deepcode, the tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help developers write better code, raised $4M in seed funding to expand it’s machine learning systems for code reviews. Deepcode plans to expand its supported list of languages (by including C#, PHP, and C/C++), improve the scope of code recommendations, and also grow the team internationally. It has also been revealed that Deepcode is working on its first integrated developer environment (IDE) project. The funding round was conducted by Earlybed, and the participants were 3VC and Btov Partners, DeepCode’s existing investor. DeepCode has also announced a new pricing structure. Previously, it was only free for open source software development projects. Today, it announced that it will also be free for educational purposes and for enterprise teams with 30 developers. https://twitter.com/DeepCodeAI/status/1158666106690838528 Launched in 2016, DeepCode reviews bugs, alerts about critical vulnerabilities, and style violations in the earlier stages of software development. Currently, DeepCode supports Java, JavaScript, and Python languages. When a developer links their Github or Bitbucket accounts to DeepCode, the DeepCode bot processes millions of commits in the available open source software projects and highlights broken codes that can cause compatibility issues. In a statement to Venturebeat, Paskalev says that DeepCode saves 50% of developers time, spent on finding bugs. Read Also: Thanks to DeepCode, AI can help you write cleaner code Earlybird co-founder and partner, Christian Nagel says, “DeepCode provides a platform that enhances the development capabilities of programmers. The team has a deep scientific understanding of code optimization and uses artificial intelligence to deliver the next breakthrough in software development.” Many open source projects have been getting major investments from tech companies lately. Last year, the software giant Microsoft acquired the open source code platform giant GitHub for $7.5 billion. Another popular platform for distributed version control and source code management GitLab also raised a $100 million Series D funding. With the software industry growing, the amount of codes written has increased to a great extent thus requiring more testing and debugging. DeepCode receiving funds is definitely good news for the developer community. https://twitter.com/andreas_herzog/status/1158666757588115456 https://twitter.com/evanderburg/status/1158710341963935745 Facebook research suggests chatbots and conversational AI are on the verge of empathizing with humans Pluribus, an AI bot built by Facebook and CMU researchers, has beaten professionals at six-player no-limit Texas Hold ’Em Poker Virality of fake news on social media: Are weaponized AI bots to blame, questions Destin Sandlin

Last week, the GNU C Library version 2.30 was made available to all users. The major highlights of this release include new POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface)-proposed functions, support for Unicode 12.1.0, support to --preload argument to preload shared objects, addition of new functions such as getdents64, gettid, and tgkill to Linux and more. The GNU C Library is used in the GNU systems, GNU/Linux systems as well as on other systems that use Linux as the kernel. It is a portable and high performance C library. Major new features in GNU C Library version 2.30 New POSIX-proposed pthread_cond_clockwait, pthread_mutex_clocklock, pthread_rwlock_clockrdlock, pthread_rwlock_clockwrlock and sem_clockwait functions have been introduced in GNU C Library version 2.30. All the functions allow waiting against CLOCK_MONOTONIC and CLOCK_REALTIME.  The GNU C Library version 2.30 has an added support of Unicode 12.1.0. Character encoding, character type info, and transliteration tables have also been updated to Unicode 12.1.0. The dynamic linker will now accept the --preload argument to preload shared objects along with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. The getdents64, gettid, and tgkill functions have been added on Linux. Memory allocation functions malloc, calloc, realloc, reallocarray, valloc, pvalloc, memalign, and posix_memalign will need object size smaller than PTRDIFF_MAX. This will help the memory allocation functions to avoid potential undefined behavior with pointer subtraction within the allocated object, which caused ptrdiff_t type overflow. Deprecated features influencing compatibility Functions like clock_gettime, clock_getres, clock_settime, clock_getcpuclockid, clock_nanosleep have been removed from the librt library for new applications. The outdated  XSI STREAMS header files <stropts.h> and <sys/stropts.h> and the RES_INSECURE1 and RES_INSECURE2 option flags for the DNS stub have been abolished. The support for “inet6” option in /etc/resolv.conf and the RES_USE_INET6 resolver flag have been eliminated. The Linux-specific <sys/sysctl.h> header and the sysctl function have been removed from the GNU C Library version 2.30 and also will not be present in the future versions of glibc. The getentropy function can be used for obtaining random bits. Bug Fixes in GNU C Library version 2.30 gettid() to have a wrapper in libc nftw() does not return dangling symlink's inode in libc mtrace hangs when MALLOC_TRACE is defined in malloc memusagestat is built using system C library in malloc libpthread IFUNC resolver for vfork can lead to crash in nptl These are select few updates. For more information, you may go through the libc sourceware page. Debian 10 codenamed ‘buster’ released, along with Debian GNU/Hurd 2019 as a port Google proposes a libc in LLVM, Rich Felker of musl libc thinks it’s a very bad idea GNU APL 1.8 releases with bug fixes, FFT, GTK, RE and more

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

On Monday, the CEO and Co-founder of Dark, Ellen Chisa, announced the project had raised $3.5 million in funding in a Medium post. Dark is a holistic project that includes a programming language (Darklang), an editor and an infrastructure. The value of this, according to Chisa, is simple: "developers can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have near-instant deployment, which we’re calling deployless." Along with Chisa, Dark is led by CTO, Paul Biggar, who is also the founder of CircleCI, the CI/CD pioneering company. The seed funding is led by Cervin Ventures, in participation with Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, Xfactor, Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West and Yubari. What are the key features of the Dark programming language? One of the most interesting features in Dark is that deployments take a mere 50 milliseconds. Fast. Chisa says that currently the best teams can manage deployments around 5–10 minutes, but many take considerably longer, sometimes hours. But Dark was designed to change this. It's purpose-built, Chisa seems to suggest, for continuous delivery. “In Dark, you’re getting the benefit of your editor knowing how the language works. So you get really great autocomplete, and your infrastructure is set up for you as soon as you’ve written any code because we know exactly what is required.” She says there are three main benefits to Dark’s approach: An automated infrastructure No need to worry about a deployment pipeline ("As soon as you write any piece of backend code in Dark, it is already hosted for you,” she explains.) Tracing capabilities are built into your code. "Because you’re using our infrastructure, you have traces available in your editor as soon as you’ve written any code. There's undoubtedly a clear sense - whatever users think of the end result - that everything has been engineered with an incredibly clear vision. Dark has been deployed on SaaS platform and project tracking tools Chisa highlights how some customers have already shipped entire products on Dark. Chase Olivieri, who built Altitude, a subscription SaaS providing personalized flight deals, using Drark is cited by Chisa, saying that "as a bootstrapper, Dark has allowed me to move fast and build Altitude without having to worry about infrastructure, scaling, or server management." Downside of Dark is programmers have to learn a new language Speaking to TechCrunch, Chisa admitted their was a downside to Dark - you have to learn a new language. "I think the biggest downside of Dark is definitely that you’re learning a new language, and using a different editor when you might be used to something else, but we think you get a lot more benefit out of having the three parts working together." Chisa acknowledged that it will require evangelizing the methodology to programmers, who may be used to employing a particular set of tools to write their programs. But according to her the biggest selling point is that it will remove the complexity around deployment by bringing an integrated level of automation to the process. Is Darklang basically like AWS Lambda? The community on Hacker News compares Dark with AWS Lambda, with many pessimistic about its prospects. In particular they are skeptical about the efficiency gains Chisa describes. "It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws [sic] lambda’s are now," said one user. "You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?” Dark’s Co-founder, Paul Biggar responded to this in the thread. “Dark founder here. Yes, completely agree with this. To a certain extent, Dark is aimed at being what lambda/serverless should have been." He continues by writing: "The thing that frustrates me about Lambda (and really all of AWS) is that we're just dealing with a bit of code and bit of data. Even in 1999 when I had just started coding I could write something that runs every 10 minutes. But now it's super challenging. Why is it so hard to take a request, munge it, send it somewhere, and then respond to it. That should be trivial! (and in Dark, it is)" The team has planned to roll out the product publicly in September. To find out more more about Dark, read the team's blog posts including What is Dark, How Dark is a functional language, and How Dark allows deploys in 50ms. The V programming language is now open source – is it too good to be true? “Why was Rust chosen for Libra?”, US Congressman questions Facebook on Libra security design choices Rust’s original creator, Graydon Hoare on the current state of system programming and safety

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

Yesterday, the Unity team announced the release of Unity 2019.2. In this release, they have added more than 170 new features and enhancements for artists, designers, and programmers. They have updated ProBuilder, Shader Graph, 2D Animation, Burst Compiler, UI Elements, and many more. Major highlights for Unity 2019.2 ProBuilder 4.0 ships as verified with 2019.2. It is a unique hybrid of 3D modeling and level design tools, optimized for building simple geometry but capable of detailed editing and UV unwrapping as needed. Polybrush is now available via Package Manager as a Preview package. This versatile tool lets you sculpt complex shapes from any 3D model, position detail meshes, paint in custom lighting or coloring, and blend textures across meshes directly in the Editor. DSPGraph is the new audio rendering/mixing system, built on top of Unity’s C# Job System. It’s now available as a Preview package. They have improved on UI Elements, Unity’s new UI framework, which renders UI for graph-based tools such as Shader Graph, Visual Effect Graph, and Visual Scripting. To help you better organize your complex graphs, Unity has added subgraphs to Visual Effect Graph. You can share, combine, and reuse subgraphs for blocks and operators, and also embed complete VFX within VFX. There is an improvement in the integration between Visual Effect Graph and the High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which pulls VFX Graph in by default, providing you with additional rendering features. With Shader Graph you can now use Color Modes to highlight nodes on your graph with colors based on various features or select your own colors to improve readability. This is especially useful in large graphs. The team has added swappable Sprites functionality to the 2D Animation tool. With this new feature, you can change a GameObject’s rendered Sprites while reusing the same skeleton rig and animation clips. This lets you quickly create multiple characters using different Sprite Libraries or customize parts of them with Sprite Resolvers. With this release Burst Compiler 1.1 includes several improvements to JIT compilation time and some C# improvements. Additionally, the Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider integrations are available as packages. Mobile developers will benefit from improved OpenGL support, as the team has added OpenGL multithreading support (iOS) to improve performance on low-end iOS devices that don’t support Metal. As with all releases, 2019.2 includes a large number of improvements and bug fixes. You can find the full list of features, improvements, and fixes in Unity 2019.2 Release Notes. How to use arrays, lists, and dictionaries in Unity for 3D game development OpenWrt 18.06.4 released with updated Linux kernel, security fixes Curl and the Linux kernel and much more! How to manage complex applications using Kubernetes-based Helm tool [Tutorial]

Yesterday the Stack Overflow site was down according to its status report on the site. The outage map reported, 931 issues on the Stack Overflow site originating from the United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Brazil and 67 more countries. The official page read, “We apologize for any inconvenience, but an unexpected error occurred while you were browsing our site. It’s not you, it’s us. This is our fault.” Downdetector also reports of the Stack Overflow outage starting at 12:30 am PDT. It shows 79% of the problems are related to the website and 20% are on its log-in page. Though there are no reports from the official Stack Overflow page or on their Twitter handle of the issues being resolved and the site being functional, Nick Craver, lead engineer and site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow tweeted yesterday at 1:30 pm PDT, “All systems are green now - a non-yielding scheduler inside our primary SQL Server caused a cascade failure of systems that depend upon it. We'll follow-up with vendors and increase our resiliency in several systems here.” https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/1156260065797726208 On Hacker News, users speculated that the issue might have been caused due to a roll out of one particular branch in Stack Overflow model over to netcoreapp2.2. One of the users commented, “2 hours earlier: https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver/status/1156220122933207041 ‘We'll be carefully rolling this out starting shortly’ .. oopsie, debug mode in production commence.” Another user comments, “The question is how are they gonna fix it without stackoverflow?” They are also annoyed with the lack of communication from the Stack Overflow team, “What's up here? I don't see any updates on their twitter or blog. What am I gonna do the rest of the day??” https://twitter.com/DronpesAtWork/status/1156248140544016386 Last week, Stack Overflow users took to its Meta site to express concerns regarding the communication breakdown between the site and its community. The users highlighted that Stack Overflow has repeatedly failed at consulting the community before coming up with a major change, with the most recent case being the removal of the “Hot Meta Posts” section. Is DevOps really that different from Agile? No, says Viktor Farcic [Podcast] Building a Twitter news bot using Twitter API [Tutorial] NSA warns users of BlueKeep vulnerability; urges them to update their Windows systems

Last week, the Python team released NumPy version 1.17.0. This version has many new features, improvements and changes to increase the performance of NumPy. The major highlight of this release includes a new extensible numpy.random module, new radix sort & timsort sorting methods and a NumPy pocketfft FFT implementation for accurate transforms and better handling of datasets of prime length. Overriding of numpy functions has also been made possible by default. NumPy 1.17.0 will support Python versions 3.5 - 3.7. Python 3.8b2 will work with the new release source packages, but may not find support in future releases. The Python team had previously updated users that Python 2.7 maintenance will stop on January 1, 2020. NumPy 1.17.0 officially dropping Python 2.7 is a step towards the adoption of Python 3. Developers who want to port their Python 2 code in Python 3, can check out the official porting guide, released by Python. Read More: NumPy drops Python 2 support. Now you need Python 3.5 or later. What’s new in NumPy 1.17.0? New extensible numpy.random module with selectable random number generators NumPy 1.17.0 has a new extensible numpy.random module. It also includes four selectable random number generators and improved seeding designed for use in parallel processes. PCG64 is the new default numpy.random module while MT19937 is retained for backwards compatibility. Timsort and radix sort have replaced mergesort for stable sorting Both the radix sort and timsort have been implemented and can be used instead of mergesort. The sorting kind options ‘stable’ and ‘mergesort’ have been made aliases of each other with the actual sort implementation for maintaining backward compatibility. Radix sort is used for small integer types of 16 bits or less and timsort is used for all the remaining types of bits. empty_like and related functions now accept a shape argument Functions like empty_like, full_like, ones_like and zeros_like will now accept a shape keyword argument, which can be used to create a new array as the prototype and overriding its shape also. These functions become extremely useful when combined with the __array_function__ protocol, as it allows the creation of new arbitrary-shape arrays from NumPy-like libraries. User-defined LAPACK detection order numpy.distutils now uses an environment variable, comma-separated and case insensitive detection order to determine the detection order for LAPACK libraries. This aims to help users with MKL installation to try different implementations. .npy files support unicode field names A new format version of .npy files has been introduced. This enables structured types with non-latin1 field names. It can be used automatically when needed. New mode “empty” for pad The new mode “empty” pads an array to a desired shape without initializing any new entries. New Deprications in NumPy 1.17.0 numpy.polynomial functions warn when passed float in place of int Previously, functions in numpy.polynomial module used to accept float values. With the latest NumPy version 1.17.0, using float values is deprecated for consistency with the rest of NumPy. In future releases, it will cause a TypeError. Deprecate numpy.distutils.exec_command and temp_file_name The internal use of these functions has been refactored for better alternatives such as replace exec_command with subprocess. Also, replace Popen and temp_file_name <numpy.distutils.exec_command> with tempfile.mkstemp. Writeable flag of C-API wrapped arrays When an array is created from the C-API to wrap a pointer to data, the writeable flag set during creation indicates the read-write nature of the data. In the future releases, it will not be possible to convert the writeable flag to True from python as it is considered dangerous. Other improvements and changes Replacement of the fftpack based fft module by the pocketfft library pocketfft library contains additional modifications compared to fftpack which helps in improving accuracy and performance. If FFT lengths has large prime factors then pocketfft uses Bluestein's algorithm, which maintains O(N log N) run time complexity instead of deteriorating towards O(N*N) for prime lengths. Array comparison assertions include maximum differences Error messages from array comparison tests such as testing.assert_allclos now include “max absolute difference” and “max relative difference” along with previous “mismatch” percentage. This makes it easier to update absolute and relative error tolerances. median and percentile family of functions no longer warn about nan Functions like numpy.median, numpy.percentile, and numpy.quantile are used to emit a RuntimeWarning when encountering a nan. Since these functions return the nan value, the warning is redundant and hence has been removed. timedelta64 % 0 behavior adjusted to return NaT The modulus operation with two np.timedelta64 operands now returns NaT in case of division by zero, rather than returning zero. Though users are happy with NumPy 1.17.0 features, some are upset over the Python version 2.7 being officially dropped. https://twitter.com/antocuni/status/1156236201625624576 For the complete list of updates, head over to NumPy 1.17.0 release notes. Plotly 4.0, popular python data visualization framework, releases with Offline Only, Express first, Displayable anywhere features Python 3.8 new features: the walrus operator, positional-only parameters, and much more Azure DevOps report: How a bug caused ‘sqlite3 for Python’ to go missing from Linux images

The ISO C++ Committee met last week at Cologne, Germany to complete and publish the Committee Draft (CD) of the next C++ standard called C++20. This standard will bring some of the game-changing advancements to C++ including modules, concepts, coroutines, and ranges to C++. Here are some of the changes made to the draft in this meeting: Contracts moved out of C++20 A contract specifies a set of preconditions, postconditions, and assertions that a software component should adhere to. The committee unanimously decided to move contracts out of C++20 and defer it to a later standard because it has recently gone through major design changes. They were unsure of the impact or implications of these changes as they did not have much usage experience with contracts. “In short, contracts were just not ready. It's better for us to ship contracts in a form that better addresses the use cases of interest in a future standard instead of shipping something we are uncertain about in C++20. Notably, this decision was unanimous -- all of the contracts’ co-authors agreed to this approach,” wrote the committee. To continue the work on contracts a new study group is created named SG21. It will be chaired by John Spicer from Edison Design Group and includes all original authors and members who are interested to work on contracts. std::format, a new text formatting API One of the key advantages of the ‘printf’ syntax is its familiarity among developers. However, it does suffer from a few drawbacks. The format specifiers it provides like hh, h, l, and j are redundant in type-safe formatting. They can unnecessarily make specification and parsing complicated. The printf syntax also does not provide a standard way for extending the syntax for user-defined types. C++20 will come with a new text formatting API called ‘std::format’ that aims to offer a flexible, safe, and fast alternative to (s)printf and iostreams. Based on the syntax we see in Python, the .NET family of languages, and Rust, it uses ‘{‘ and ‘}’ as replacement field delimiters instead of %. The C++20 synchronization library This new standard will bring new improved synchronization and thread coordination facilities. It will support efficient ‘atomic’ waiting and semaphores, latches, barriers, atomic_flag::test, lockfree integral types, and more. The next step for the committee is to submit the draft to all the national standard bodies to gather their feedback. The committee plans to address their feedback in the next two meetings and then publish the C++20 standard at the February 2020 meeting in Prague. Developers are excited about the new features C++20 will come with. A Reddit user commented, “Wow, the C++ committee is really doing a great job. There are so many good features coming into the standard (std::format, constexpr features, better threading support, etc, etc). Thank you all for all of your hard work.” Others are not very impressed by the ‘web_view’ proposal. This introduces a facility that aims to enable natural, multimodal user interaction with the help of existing web standards and technologies. Another user added, “Very surprising, I didn't expect that because personally, I think that the proposal is not very good. If we use JS and other technologies to display stuff, why not directly use those languages? Why go through C++? But maybe I don't understand it; I'll make sure to go through the minutes.” You can read the full report posted by the ISO C++ Committee for more details. ISO C++ Committee announces that C++20 design is now feature complete GCC 9.1 releases with improved diagnostics, simpler C++ errors and much more Code completion suggestions via IntelliCode comes to C++ in Visual Studio 2019  

Update: On 31st July, Ian Lance Taylor posted in detail explaining the benefits and costs of including generics in Go. He also briefly discussed the draft design to convey how generics is going to be added to the Go language. Taylor says “Our goal is to arrive at a design that makes it possible to write the kinds of generic code, without making the language too complex to use or making it not feel like Go anymore.” Check out the Goland blog for more details. On 26th July at GopherCon 2019, Ian Lance Taylor introduced generics codes in Go. He briefly explained the need, implementation and benefits from generics for the Go language. Next, Taylor reviewed the Go contract design draft which included addition of optional type parameters to types and functions. https://twitter.com/ymotongpoo/status/1154957680651276288 https://twitter.com/lelenanam/status/1154819005925867520 Taylor also proposed guidelines for implementing generic design in Go. https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/1154794627548897280 In all the three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has been listed as one of the three highest priorities for fixing the Go language. Taylor defines generic as “Generic programming which enables the representation of functions and data structures in a generic form, with types factored out.” Generic code is written using types, which are specified later. An unspecified type is called as type parameter. A type parameter offers support only when permitted by contracts. A generic code imparts strong basis for sharing codes and building programs. It can be compiled using an interface-based approach which optimizes time as the package is compiled only once. If a generic code is compiled multiple times, it can carry compile time cost. Some of the many functions that can be written generically in Go include - Image Source: Source graph Go already supports two generic data structures which are built using Slice and Map languages. Go requires data structures to be written only once and then reused after putting it in a package. The contract draft design states that since Go is designed to support programming, a clear contract should be maintained between a generic code and a calling code. With the new changes, users may find the language more complex. However, the Go team expects users to not write generic code themselves, instead use packages that are written by others using generic code. Developers are very happy that the Go generics proposal is simple to understand and enables users to depend on the already written generic packages. This will save them time as users need not rewrite type specific functions in Go. https://twitter.com/lizrice/status/1154802013982449666 https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1155286562659282952 https://twitter.com/arschles/status/1154793543149375488 https://twitter.com/YvanDaSilva/status/1155432594818969600 https://twitter.com/mickael/status/1154799370610466816 Users have also admired the new contract design draft by the Go team. https://twitter.com/miyagawa/status/1154810546002153473 https://twitter.com/t_colgate/status/1155380984671551488 https://twitter.com/francesc/status/1154796941227646976 Head over to the Google proposal page for more details on the new contract draft design. Read More Ian Lance Taylor, Golang team member, adds another perspective to Go being Google’s language Is Golang truly community driven and does it really matter? Go User Survey 2018 results: Golang goes from strength to strength, as more engineers than ever are using it at work

Last month, CERN, one of the leading scientific research organizations planned to stop using Microsoft-based programs to look out for affordable open-source software. For the past 20 years, CERN has been using Microsoft products at a discounted "academic institution" rate. Things changed in March when its previous contract was ending and Microsoft revoked CERN's academic status and as per a CERN’s blog post, under the new contract, licensing costs have been increased.  Meanwhile, CERN is now focusing on its year-old project known as, Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) and plans to migrate to open-source software. MAlt’s principles of engagement are: delivering the same service to every category of CERN personnel, avoiding vendor lock-in for decreasing risk and dependency, keeping hands-on data and addressing the common use-cases. The official post reads, “The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases. MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software. It is now time to present more widely this project and to explain how it will shape our computing environment.” https://twitter.com/Razican/status/1138818892825055233 This summer, MAlt will start with a pilot mail service for the IT department and volunteers. CERN plans to migrate all of its staff to the new mail service and also move the Skype for Business clients and analogue phones to a softphone pilot. Microsoft agreed to increase CERN's fees over a ten-year period so that the institution could adapt but it was still unsustainable as per CERN. Emmanuel Ormancey, a CERN system analyst, wrote in a blog post, “Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.” Considering CERN’s collaborative nature and its wide community, a large number of licenses are required for delivering the services to everyone. The costs per product becomes unaffordable when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied. It got unaffordable for CERN to go for commercial software licenses with a per-user fee structure. While many other public research institutions have previously been affected by this new licensing structure.  While few users still think Microsoft was a better choice and are on the point that it would be difficult for CERN to migrate. A user commented on HackerNews, “Migrating away from Microsoft won't be easy. Despite high licensing costs, Windows, AD and Exchange are still great solutions with millions of people familiar with them, good documentation and support.” Few others are happy about CERN’s decision to support open source. Another user commented, “It is awesome to see how CERN is supporting open source. They have been long time users of our open core GitLab with 12,000 users https://about.gitlab.com/customers/cern/” To know more about this news, check out the official post. Softbank announces a second AI-focused Vision Fund worth $108 billion with Microsoft, Apple as major investors Why are experts worried about Microsoft’s billion dollar bet in OpenAI’s AGI pipe dream? Ex-Microsoft employee arrested for stealing over $10M from store credits using a test account