Tech News - Application Development

Last Sunday, the team behind Neovim, a project that refactors Vim source code released NVIM v0.4.0. This release received approximately 2700 commits since v0.3.4, which was a non-maintenance release. It comes with improvements to documentation, test/CI infrastructure, internal subsystems and 700+ patches that are merged from Vim. What’s new in NVIM v0.4.0? API functions This release comes with a new function, nvim_create_buf that is used for creating various types of buffers including nvim_get_context and nvim_load_context. The nvim_input_mouse function is used for performing mouse actions. Users can create floating windows with nvim_open_win. UI events The new UI events including redraw.grid_destroy, redraw.hl_group_set, redraw.msg_clear, and much more are included. Lua library NVIM v0.4.0 introduces "Nvim-Lua standard library" that comes with string functions and generates documentation from docstrings. Multigrid windows It now features windows that are isolated internally and can be drawn on separate grids. These windows are sent as distinct objects to UIs so that UIs can control the layout.   Support for sign columns It comes with support for multiple auto-adjusted sign columns, so users will  be shown extra columns to automatically accommodate all the existing signs. Major changes It has improved Lua error messages and fixed menu_get(). In NVIM v0.4.0, jemalloc, general purpose malloc implementation has been removed. In this release, the 'scrollback' option is more consistent and future-proof.  To know more about this news, check out the release notes. Other interesting news in programming A recap of the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 GNU community announces ‘Parallel GCC’ for parallelism in real-world compilers TextMate 2.0, the text editor for macOS releases  

Yesterday, the team behind Dark programming language has unveiled Darklang’s private beta version. Dark is a holistic programming language, editor, and infrastructure for building backends. Developers can write in the Dark language, using the Dark editor, and the program is hosted on Dark’s infrastructure. As a result, they can code without thinking about infrastructure, and have safe instant deployment, which the team is calling “deployless” development. According to the team, backends today are too complicated to build and they have designed Dark in a way to reduce that complexity. Ellen Chisa, CEO of the Dark says, “Today we’re releasing two videos showing how Dark works. And demonstrate how to build a backend application (an office sign-in app) in 10 minutes.” Paul Biggar, the CTO also talks about the Dark’s philosophy and the details of the language, the editor and the infrastructure. He also shows how they make “deployless” safe with feature flags and versioning, and how Dark allows to introspect and debug live requests. Alpha users of Darklang build backends for web and mobile applications The Dark team says that during the private alpha, developers have built entire backends in Dark. Chase Olivieri built Altitude, a flight deal subscription site. Julius Tarng moved the backend of Tokimeki Unfollow to Dark for scalability. Jessica Greenwalt & Pixelkeet ported Birb, their internal project tracker, into a SaaS for other design studios to use. The team has also seem alpha users build backends for web and mobile applications, internal tools, Slackbots, Alexa skills, and personal projects. And they’ve even started building parts of Dark in Dark, including their presence service and large parts of the signup flow. Additionally, the team will let you in the private beta of Darklang immediately if the developers have their project well-scoped and ready to get started. Community unhappy with private version, and expect open-source On Hacker News, users are discussing that in this time and age if there is any new programming language, it has to be open-source. One of them commented, “Is there an open source version of the language? ...bc I'm not touching a programming language with a ten foot pole if it hasn't got at least two implementations, and at least one open source :| Sure, keep the IDEs and deployless infrastructure and all proprietary, but a core programming language in 2019 can only be open-source. Heck, even Microsoft gets it now.” Another one says, “They are 'allowing' people into a private beta of a programming language? Coupled with the fact it is not open source and has a bunch of fad ad-tech videos on the front page this is so many red flags.” While others compare Dark with different programming languages, mainly Apex, Rust and Go. A user comment reads, “I see a lot of Parse comparisons, but for me this is way more like Force.com from Salesforce and the Apex language. Proprietary language (Apex, which is Java 6-ish), complete vertical integration, no open source spec or implementation.” Another one says, “Go - OK, it has one implementation (open-source), but it's backed by one big player (Google) and used by many others... also the simplicity at core design decisions sound like the kind of choices that would make an alternative compiler easier to implement than for other languages Rust - pretty fast growing open-source community despite only one implementation... but yeah I'm sort of worried that Rust is a "hard to implement" kind of language with maybe a not high enough bus factor... similar worries for Julia too But tbh I'm not drawn much to either Go and Rust for other reasons - Go is too verbose for my taste, no way to write denser code that highlights the logic instead of the plumbing, and it has a "dumb" type system, Rust seems a really bad choice for rapid prototyping and iteration which is what I care about now.” Other interesting news in programming this week Introducing ‘ixy’, a simple user-space network driver written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and C#, among others TextMate 2.0, the text editor for macOS releases GNU community announces ‘Parallel GCC’ for parallelism in real-world compilers

This year’s Linux Plumbers Conference concluded on the 11th of September 2019. This invitation-only conference for Linux top kernel developers was held in Lisbon, Portugal this year. The conference brings developers working on the plumbing of Linux - kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, etc. to think about core design problems. Unlike most tech conferences that generally discuss the future of the Linux operating system, the Linux Plumbers Conference has a distinct motive behind it. In an interview with ZDNet, Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator said, “The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn't even talk about technical issues. It's all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel.” In short, the developers attending the conference know confidential and intimate details about some of the Linux kernel subsystems, and maybe this is why the conference has the word ‘Plumbers’ in it. Read Also: Introducing kdevops, a modern DevOps framework for Linux kernel development The conference is divided into several working sessions focusing on different plumbing topics. This year the Linux Plumbers Conference had over 18 microconferences, with topics like RISC-V, tracing, distribution kernels, live patching, open printing, toolchains, testing and fuzzing, and more. Some Micro conferences covered in Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 The Linux Plumbers 2019 RISC-V MC (microconference) focussed on finding the solutions for changing the kernel. In the long run, this discussion of changing the kernel is expected to result in active developer participation for code review/patch submissions for a better and more stable kernel for RISC-V. Some of the topics covered in RISC-V MC included RISC-V platform specification progress and fixing the Linux boot process in RISC-V. The Plumbers Live Patching MC had an open discussion for all the involved stakeholders to discuss the live patching related issues such that it will help in making the live patching of the Linux kernel and the Linux userspace live patching feature complete. This open discussion has been a success in past conferences as it leads to useful output which helps in pushing the development of the live patching forward. Some of the topics included all the happenings in kernel live in the last one year, API for state changes made by callbacks and source-based livepatch creation tooling. The System Boot and Security MC concentrated on open source security, including bootloaders, firmware, BMCs and TPMs. The potential speakers and key participants for the MC had everybody interested in GRUB, iPXE, coreboot, LinuxBoot, SeaBIOS, UEFI, OVMF, TianoCore, IPMI, OpenBMC, TPM, and other related projects and technologies. The main goal of this year’s Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) MC was to resolve the open issues in RDMA and PCI peer to peer for GPU and NVMe applications, including HMM and DMABUF topics, RDMA and DAX, contiguous system memory allocations for userspace which is unresolved from 2017 and many more. Other areas of interest included multi-vendor virtualized 'virtio' RDMA, non-standard driver features and their impact on the design of the subsystem, and more. Read Also: Linux kernel announces a patch to allow 0.0.0.0/8 as a valid address range Linux developers who attended the Plumbers 2019 conference were appreciative of the conference and took to Twitter to share their experiences. https://twitter.com/russelldotcc/status/1172193214272606209 https://twitter.com/odeke_et/status/1173108722744225792 https://twitter.com/jwboyer19/status/1171351233149448193 The videos of the conference are not out yet. The team behind the conference has tweeted that they will be uploading them soon. Keep checking this space for more details about the Linux Plumbers Conference 2019. Meanwhile, you can check out last year’s talks on YouTube. Latest news in Linux Lilocked ransomware (Lilu) affects thousands of Linux-based servers Microsoft announces its support for bringing exFAT in the Linux kernel; open sources technical specs IBM open-sources Power ISA and other chips; brings OpenPOWER foundation under the Linux Foundation

Yesterday, the team behind the GNU project announced Parallel GCC, a research project aiming to parallelize a real-world compiler. Parallel GCC can be used in machines with many cores where GNU cannot provide enough parallelism. A parallel GCC can be also used to design a parallel compiler from scratch. GCC is an optimizer compiler that automatically optimizes code when compiling. GCC optimization phase involves three steps: Inter Procedural Analysis (IPA): This builds a callgraph and uses it to decide how to perform optimizations. GIMPLE Intra Procedural Optimizations: This performs several hardware-independent optimizations inside the function. RTL Intra Procedural Optimizations: This performs several hardware-dependent optimizations inside the function. As IPA collects information and decides how to optimize all functions, it then sends a function to the GIMPLE optimizer, which then sends the function to the RTL optimizer, and the final code is generated. This process repeats for every function in the code. Also Read: Oracle introduces patch series to add eBPF support for GCC Why a Parallel GCC? The team designed the parallel architecture to increase parallelism and reduce overhead. While IPA finishes its analysis, a number of threads equal to the number of logical processors are spawned to avoid scheduling overhead. Further, one of those thread inserts all analyzed functions into a threadsafe producer-consumer queue, which all threads are responsible to consume. Once a thread has finished processing one function, it queries for the next function available in the queue, until it finds an EMPTY token. When it happens, the thread should finalize as there are no more functions to be processed. This architecture is used to parallelize per-function GIMPLE Intra Process Optimizations and can be easily extended to also support RTL Intra Process Optimizations. This, however, does not cover IPA passes nor the per-language Front End analysis. Code refactoring to achieve Parallel GCC The team refactored several parts of the GCC middle-end code in the Parallel GCC project. The team says there are still many places where code refactoring is necessary for this project to succeed. “The original code required a single function to be optimized and outputted from GIMPLE to RTL without any possible change of what function is being compiled,” the researchers wrote in their official blog. Several structures in GCC were made per-thread or threadsafe, either being replicated by using the C11 thread notation, by allocating the data structure in the thread stack, or simply inserting locks. “One of the most tedious parts of the job was detecting making several global variables threadsafe, and they were the cause of most crashes in this project. Tools made for detecting data-races, such as Helgrind and DRD, were useful in the beginning but then showed its limitations as the project advanced. Several race conditions had a small window and did not happen when the compiler ran inside these tools. Therefore there is a need for better tools to help to find global variables or race conditions,” the blog mentions. Performance results The team compiled the file gimple-match.c, the biggest file in the GCC project. This file has more than 100,000 lines of code, with around 1700 functions, and almost no loops inside these functions. The computer used in this Benchmark had an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU, with 8Gb of RAM. Therefore, this computer had a CPU with 4 cores with Hyperthreading, resulting in 8 virtual cores. The following are the results before and after Intra Procedural GIMPLE parallelization. Source: gcc.gnu.org The figure shows our results before and after Intra Procedural GIMPLE parallelization. In this figure, we can observe that the time elapsed, dropped from 7 seconds to around 4 seconds with 2 threads and around 3 seconds with 4 threads, resulting in a speedup of 1.72x and 2.52x, respectively. Here we can also see that using Hyperthreading did not impact the result. This result was used to estimate the improvement in RTL parallelization. Source: gcc.gnu.org The above results show when compared with the total compilation time, there is a small improvement of 10% when compiling the file. Source: gcc.gnu.org In this figure using the same approach as in the previous graph, users can estimate a speedup of 1.61x in GCC when it gets parallelized by using the speedup information obtained in GIMPLE. The team has suggested certain To-Dos for users wanting to implement parallel GCC: Find and fix all race conditions in GIMPLE. There are still random crashes when a code is compiled using the parallel option. Make this GCC compile itself. Make this GCC pass all tests in the testsuite. Add support to a multithread environment to Garbage Collector. Parallelize RTL part. This will improve our current results, as indicated in Results chapter. Parallelize IPA part. This can also improve the time during LTO compilations. Refactor all occurrences of thread by allocating these variables as soon as threads are started, or at a pass execution. GCC project members say that this project is under development and still has several bugs. A user on Hacker News writes, “I look forward to this. One that will be important for reproducible builds is having tests for non-determinism. Having nondeterministic code gen in a compiler is a source of frustration and despair and sucks to debug.” To know about the Parallel GCC in detail, read the official document. Other interesting news in programming Introducing ‘ixy’, a simple user-space network driver written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and C#, among others  GNOME 3.34 releases with tab pinning, improved background panel, custom folders and more! The Eclipse Foundation releases Jakarta EE 8, the first truly open-source, vendor-neutral Java EE

Yesterday, the team behind TextMate released TextMate 2.0. They announced that the code for TextMate 2.0 is available via the GitHub repository. In 2012, the team had open-sourced the alpha version of TextMate 2.0.  One of the reasons why the company open-sourced the code for TextMate 2.0 was to indicate that Apple isn’t limiting user and developer freedom on the Mac platform. In this release, the qualifier suffix in the version string has been deprecated and even the 32 bit APIs have been replaced. This release comes with improved accessibility support. What’s new in TextMate 2.0? Makes swapping easy This release allows users to easily swap pieces of code. Makes search results convenient TextMate presents the results of the search in a way that users can switch between matches, extract matched text and preview desired replacements. Version control  Users can see changes in the file browser view and they can check the changes made to lines of code in the editor view. Improved commands  TextMate features WebKit as well as a dialog framework for Mac-native or HTML-based interfaces. Converting code pieces into snippets  Users can now turn commonly used pieces of text or code into snippets with transformations, placeholders, and more. Bundles Users can use bundles for customization and a number of different languages, workflows, markup systems, and more.  Macros  TextMate features Marcos that eliminates repetitive work.  This project was supposed to release years ago and now it has finally released that makes a lot of users happy.  A user commented on GitHub, “Thank you @sorbits. For making TextMate in the first place all those years ago. And thank you to everyone who has and continues to contribute to the ongoing development of TextMate as an open source project. ~13 years later and this is still the only text editor I use… all day every day.” Another user commented, “Immense thanks to all those involved over the years!” A user commented on HackerNews, “I have a lot of respect for Allan Odgaard. Something happened, and I don't want to speculate, that caused him to take a break from Textmate (version 2.0 was supposed to come out 9 or so years ago). Instead of abandoning the project he open sourced it and almost a decade later it is being released. Textmate is now my graphical Notepad on Mac, with VS Code being my IDE and vim my text editor. Thanks Allan.” It is still not clear as to what took TextMate 2.0 this long to get released. According to a few users on HackerNews, Allan Odgaard, the creator of TextMate wanted to improve the designs in TextMate 1 and he realised that it would require a lot of work to do the same. So he had to rewrite everything that might have taken away his time. Another comment reads, “As Allan was getting less feedback about the code he was working on, and less interaction overall from users, he became less motivated. As the TextMate 2 project dragged past its original timeline, both Allan and others in the community started to get discouraged. I would speculate he started to feel like more of the work was a chore rather than a joyful adventure.” To know more about this news, check out the release notes. Other interesting news in Programming Introducing ‘ixy’, a simple user-space network driver written in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and C#, among others  GNOME 3.34 releases with tab pinning, improved background panel, custom folders and more! GitHub Package Registry gets proxy support for the npm registry  

Yesterday, GNOME 3.34 was released as the latest version of GNOME, the open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems GNOME 3.34 comes 6 months after the release of GNOME 3.32, with features such as custom folders, tab pinning, improved background panel, Boxes, and much more. This release also offers support for more than 34 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Fun Fact: GNOME 3.34 release is termed “Thessaloniki” in recognition of GNOME’s primary annual conference GUADEC which was held in Thessaloniki, Greece.[/box] What’s new in GNOME 3.34? Visual refreshers This release includes visual refreshes for a number of applications, including the desktop. The background selection settings have been redesigned and it is now easy to select custom backgrounds. Custom folders This release introduces custom folders in the application overview where users can simply drag an application icon on top of another for creating a folder. Once all the icons have been dragged out, folders are automatically removed. Tab pinning GNOME 3.34 brings tab pinning, so users can now pin their favorite tabs and save them in the tab list. Improved ad-blocking In this release, the ad-blocking feature has now been updated to use WebKit content filters.  Improved box workflow GNOME’s virtual and remote machine manager, ‘boxes’ has received a number of improvements. Separate dialogs are now being used while adding a remote connection or external broker. The existing virtual machines can now be booted from an attached CD/DVD image so users can now simulate dual-booting environments. Game state can now be saved GNOME’s retro gaming application, ‘Games’ can now support multiple save states per game. Users can save as many game state snapshots as they want. Users can also export the Save states and share them or move them between devices. Improved Background panel The Background panel has been redesigned and it shows a preview of the selected background that is in use under the desktop panel and lock screen. Users can now add custom backgrounds by using the “Add Picture… button”. Improvements in Music application Music can now watch tracked sources including the Music folder in the Home directory for new or changed files and will now get updated automatically. This release features gapless playback and comes with an updated layout where the album, artist and playlist views have now been updated with a better layout. https://youtu.be/qAjPRr5SGoY Updates for Developers and System Administrators Flaptak 1.4 releases in sync with GNOME 3.34 Flatpak 1.4 has been released in sync with GNOME 3.34. Flatpak is central to GNOME’s developer experience plans and is a cross-distribution, cross-desktop technology for application building and distribution. New updates to Builder In this release, Builder, a GNOME IDE has also received a number of new features; it can now run a program in a container via podman. Even the Git integration has now been moved to an out-of-process gnome-builder-git daemon.  Sysprof has been integrated with core platform libraries In this release, Sysprof, the GNOME instrumenting and system profiling utility has been improved; it has now been integrated with a number of core platform libraries such as GTK, GJS, and Mutter. New applications: Icon Library and Icon Preview  In this release, two new applications, Icon Library and Icon Preview have been released, Icon Library can be used for browsing symbolic icons and Icon Preview helps designers and developers in creating and testing new application icons.  Improved font rendering library Pango, the font rendering library now makes rendering text easier as developers will now have more advanced control over their text rendering options.  To know more about this news, check out the release notes. Other interesting news in Programming GitHub Package Registry gets proxy support for the npm registry Project management platform ClubHouse announces ‘Free Plan’ for up to 10 users and a new documentation tool The Eclipse Foundation releases Jakarta EE 8, the first truly open-source, vendor-neutral Java EE    

Similar to the npm registry, RubyGems, and Docker Hub, GitHub also introduced its own package management service called GitHub Package Registry in May this year. After gathering community feedback, the team yesterday announced that the service now has proxy support for the primary npm registry. Also, the feature that created a release whenever you published a package is now removed. GitHub Package Registry and its features GitHub Package Registry allows you to host packages publicly or privately and code in one place. It provides you an end-to-end DevOps workflow consisting of your code, Continuous Integration (CI), and deployment solutions by integrating with GitHub APIs, GitHub Actions, and Webhooks. There are a number of features that GitHub Package Registry comes with. It inherits the permissions and visibility associated with the repository. This unified permissions management relieves organizations from maintaining a separate package registry and mirror permissions across systems. GitHub Package Registry gives you an insight into packages by providing data such as download statistics, version history, and more. It also supports multi-format packages so you can host multiple software package types in one registry. Read also: GitHub announces the beta version of GitHub Package Registry, its new package management service Proxy support for the primary npm registry With the npm.js proxy support, developers will be able to set the GitHub Package Registry as the source of their organization’s npm packages and the proxied source of packages from npm. To use this feature you just need to change OWNER to your GitHub organization or username in your project’s ‘.npmrc’ file. This will instruct npm to redirect all package requests to GitHub Package Registry, which will then serve any requests for a package in your account. In the future, the team plans to expand this feature to support other npm sources as well and add proxy support for other package types including Maven, NuGet, and Ruby. In order to prevent outages, they also plan to build a permanent cache on top of the proxy service. Another update is that the feature that automatically created releases when you published a package, is now removed. Explaining the reason, the team wrote in the announcement, “Many customers expressed that automatically creating a release for every package published was unexpected and undesirable and that it led to conflicts for repositories that were managing their releases closely already. As of today, publishing a package will no longer create an accompanying release.” The service is currently available in a limited public beta. GitHub is planning to make the service generally available via GitHub Universe later this year. Till then, it seeks for your feedback through the GitHub Package Registry survey. You can read the official announcement to know more in detail. Other news in programming Core Python team confirms sunsetting Python 2 on January 1, 2020 Developers from the Swift for TensorFlow project propose adding first-class differentiable programming to Swift Go 1.13 releases with error wrapping, TLS 1.3 enabled by default, improved number literals, and more

ClubHouse, a popular project management platform has announced a free plan for smaller teams and a new collaborative documentation tool called ‘ClubHouse Write’. What is interesting is that although there are a number of competitors in the project management space, including the popular Atlassian Jira, few if any are offering it for free. ClubHouse provides a ‘Free plan’ for smaller teams of up to 10 users This no-cost option allows teams of up to 10 users to get unlimited access to ClubHouse core features such as core features Stories, Epics, Milestones for free.  These features show how everyday tasks of a team contribute towards a larger company goal. Additional features for support and additional security are available in Standard and Enterprise Plans for larger teams. All current small plan customers with 10 users or less, will be automatically transitioned over to the Free Plan. Organizations that previously paid an annual fee and have 10 or fewer users will be refunded the difference in price. Once a team adds the 11th user, they will transition to the current Standard Plan. Although Free Plan does not support Observers, if teams have Observers on a current Small Plan, they will be allowed to keep existing Observers. Users were quite excited about this new Free Plan, commenting about it on social media platforms. “You guys rock! One less expense to worry about it until I hit my stride. I'll gladly be paying for 11+ members when I can reach my goals,” reads a comment. Another says, “Thanks! I LOVE CLUBHOUSE! I would still gladly pay $10/mth maybe you should have made free for teams up to 5, but then kept small for 5-10 :)” ClubHouse Write, a collaborative documentation tool Along with today’s Free Plan announcement, Clubhouse has introduced Write, a real-time collaborative documentation tool. This product is currently in beta and will “make it easier for your software team to document, collaborate, and ideate together.” Software development teams will be able to collaborate, organize and comment on project documentation in real-time, for inter-team communication. Development teams can organize their Docs in multiple Collections. They can also choose to keep a Doc private or publish to the whole Workspace. Users will also be notified when there are new comments on followed Docs. In an interview with TechCrunch, Clubhouse discussed how the offerings will provide key competitive positioning against competitors such as Atlassian’s project management tool “Jira,”. Clubhouse Write, will compete head-on with Atlassian’s team collaboration product “Confluence.” Twitteratis were also quite excited about this new development. https://twitter.com/kkukshtel/status/1171829400951824384 https://twitter.com/kieranmoolchan/status/1171450725877997568 Other interesting news in Tech The Eclipse Foundation releases Jakarta EE 8, the first truly open-source, vendor-neutral Java EE. The Continuous Intelligence report by Sumo Logic highlights the rise of Multi-Cloud adoption and open source technologies like Kubernetes. Apple’s September 2019 Event: iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max, Watch Series 5, Apple TV+, iPad, and more.

Last month, the team at Microsoft introduced content camera feature to the Microsoft Teams Rooms useful for meetings. With this feature, users can intelligently include a whiteboard for presentation in their Teams meeting.  https://twitter.com/randychapman/status/1169884205141987332 Microsoft Teams content camera uses Artificial Intelligence to detect, crop and frame the in-room traditional whiteboard and also share its content with the participants (in the meeting). Interestingly, the new feature makes the presenter standing in front of the whiteboard translucent so that remote participants can see the content right through them. https://youtu.be/1XvgH2rNpmk IT administrators can add certified content cameras to their USB ports in the Microsoft Teams Rooms systems. Once the content camera connects to the room, the admin can select the respective camera for input with the Device Settings menu. Currently, Crestron and Logitech cameras are available and certified for use with the Teams content camera functionality. The team at Microsoft has announced that they will be adding more cameras soon. Microsoft partners are also offering unique mounting systems so that users can fit their cameras into any meeting space. The company announced that ceiling tiles and digital signal processor (DSPs) options are also certified for use in the meeting rooms.  Users seem to be excited about this news, a user commented on HackerNews, “I don't see myself using this, but its really cool. The whole "see through presenter" thing is awesome. Somewhat unrelated, but it would be really cool to see that done using AR glasses.” https://twitter.com/AndrewMorpeth/status/1169907577905270784 https://twitter.com/ramsacDan/status/1170595795873292288 To know more about this news, check out the official post. Other interesting news in programming Microsoft introduces Static TypeScript, as an alternative to embedded interpreters, for programming MCU-based devices LLVM 9.0 RC3 is now out with official RISC-V support, updates to SystemZ and more Developers from the Swift for TensorFlow project propose adding first-class differentiable programming to Swift  

Last week, the LLVM team announced the release of LLVM 9.0 RC3, which fixes all the known release blockers. LLVM 9.0 missed its planned release date, which was 28th August. However, with the third RC out, we can expect it to be released soon in the coming weeks along with subprojects like Clang 9.0. LLVM 9.0 will include features like RISC-V official support, gfx10 support for AMDGPU compiler backend, among others. Announcing the release, the team shared on the LLVM mailing list, “There are currently no open release blockers, which means if nothing new comes up, the final release could ship soon and this is what it would look like (except for more release notes, which are still very welcome).” What’s new coming in LLVM 9.0 Official support for RISC-V target In July this year, Alex Bradbury, CTO and Co-Founder of the lowRISC project proposed to make the “experimental” RISC-V LLVM backend “official” for LLVM 9.0. This essentially means that starting with this release, the RISC-V backend will be built by default for LLVM. Developers will be able to use it for standard LLVM/Clang builds out of the box. Explaining the reason behind this update, Bradbury wrote in the proposal, “As well as being more convenient for end users, this also makes it significantly easier for e.g. Rust/Julia/Swift and other languages using LLVM for code generation to do so using the system-provided LLVM libraries. This will make life easier for those working on RISC-V ports of Linux distros encountering issues with Rust dependencies.” Updates to the SystemZ target Starting from LLVM 9.0, the SystemZ target will support the ‘arch13’ architecture. It will include builtins for the new vector instructions, which can be enabled using the ‘-mzvector’ option. The compiler will also support and automatically generate alignment hints on vector load and store instructions. Updates to the AMDGPU target In LLVM 9.0, the function call support is enabled by default. Other updates include improved support for 96-bit loads and stores, gfx10 support, and DPP combiner pass enabled by default. Updates to LLDB LLVM 9.0 will be the last release that will include ‘lldb-mi’ as part of LLDB, however, it will still be available in a downstream GitHub repository. Other changes include color highlighted backtraces and support for DWARF4 (debug_types) and DWARF5 (debug_info) type units. To read the entire list of updates in LLVM 9.0, check out the official release notes. LLVMs Arm stack protection feature turns ineffective when the stack is re-allocated LLVM WebAssembly backend will soon become Emscripten’s default backend, V8 announces LLVM 8.0.0 releases!  

Last week, the team at Microsoft announced the XLOOKUP feature for Excel users, a successor to the VLOOKUP function, the first lookup function learned by Excel users. XLOOKUP feature gives Excel users an easier way of displaying information in their spreadsheets. Currently, this function is only available to Office 365 testers and the company will be making it more broadly available. XLOOKUP has the ability to look vertically as well as horizontally and it replaces HLOOKUP too.  XLOOKUP just needs 3 arguments for performing the most common exact lookup whereas VLOOKUP required 4. The official post reads, “Let’s consider its signature in the simplest form: XLOOKUP(lookup_value,lookup_array,return_array) lookup_value: What you are looking for lookup_array: Where to find it return_array: What to return”  XLOOKUP overcomes the limitations of VLOOKUP Exact match in XLOOKUP is possible VLOOKUP resulted in a default approximate match of what the user was looking for, rather than the exact match. With XLOOKUP users can now find the exact match. Data can be drawn on both sides  VLOOKUP can draw on the data that’s on the right-hand side of the reference column, so users have to rearrange their data to use the function. With XLOOKUP, users can easily draw on the data both to the left and right, and it also combines VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP into a single function. Column insertions/deletions VLOOKUP’s 3rd argument is the column number so if you insert or delete a column then you have to increment or decrement the column number inside the VLOOKUP. With XLOOKUP users can easily insert or delete columns. Search from the back is now possible With VLOOKUP, users need to reverse the order of the data for finding the last occurrence of the data but with XLOOKUP it is easy for users to search the data from the back. References cells systematically For VLOOKUP, the 2nd argument, table_array, needs to be stretched from the lookup column to the results column. It references more cells which results in unnecessary calculations, reducing the performance of your spreadsheets. XLOOKUP systematically references the cells which don’t lead to complications in calculations. In an email to CNBC, Joe McDaid, Excel’s senior program manager wrote, XLOOKUP is “more powerful than INDEX/MATCH and more approachable than VLOOKUP.” To know more about this news, check out the official post. What’s new in application development this week? Microsoft announces its support for bringing exFAT in the Linux kernel; open sources technical specs Qt introduces Qt for MCUs, a graphics toolkit for creating a fluid user interface on microcontrollers Twilio launched Verified By Twilio, that will show customers who is calling them and why      

Facebook is seemingly working on a new messaging app called Threads that would help users to share their photos, videos, location, speed, and battery life with only their close friends, The Verge reported earlier this week. This means users can selectively share content with their friends while not revealing to others the list of close friends with whom the content is shared. The app currently does not display the real-time location but it might notify by stating that a friend is “on the move” as per the report by The Verge. How do Threads work? As per the report by The Verge,  Threads app appears to be similar to the existing messaging product inside the Instagram app. It seems to be an extension of the ‘Close friends’ feature for Instagram stories where users can create a list of close friends and make their stories just visible to them.  With Threads, users who have opted-in for ‘automatic sharing’ of updates will be able to regularly show their status updates and real-time information  in the main feed to their close friends.. The auto-sharing of statuses will be done using the mobile phone sensors.  Also, the messages coming from your friends would appear in a central feed, with a green dot that will indicate which of your friends are currently active/online. If a friend has posted a story recently on Instagram, you will be able to see it even from Threads app. It also features a camera, which can be used to capture photos and videos and send them to close friends. While Threads are currently being tested internally at Facebook, there is no clarity about the launch of Threads. Direct’s revamped version or Snapchat’s potential competitor? With Threads, if Instagram manages to create a niche around the ‘close friends’, it might shift a significant proportion of Snapchat’s users to its platform.  In 2017, the team had experimented with Direct, a standalone camera messaging app, which had many filters that were similar to Snapchat. But this year in May, the company announced that they will no longer be supporting Direct. Threads look like a Facebook’s second attempt to compete with Snapchat. https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1128875881462677504 Threads app focus on strengthening the ‘close friends’ relationships might promote more of personal data sharing including even location and battery life. This begs the question: Is our content really safe? Just three months ago, Instagram was in the news for exposing personal data of millions of influencers online. The exposed data included contact information of Instagram influencers, brands and celebrities https://twitter.com/hak1mlukha/status/1130532898359185409 According to Instagram’s current Terms of Use, it does not get ownership over the information shared on it. But here’s the catch, it also states that it has the right to host, use, distribute, run, modify, copy, publicly perform or translate, display, and create derivative works of user content as per the user’s privacy settings. In essence, the platform has a right to use the content we post.  Facebook open-sources Hyperparameter autotuning for fastText to automatically find best hyperparameters for your dataset Twitter and Facebook removed accounts of Chinese state-run media agencies aimed at undermining Hong protests   Facebook must face privacy class action lawsuit, loses facial recognition appeal, U.S. Court of Appeals rules

Last week, the team behind NetNewsWire released NetNewsWire 5.0, a free and open-source RSS reader for Mac. NetNewsWire lets users read articles from their favorite blogs and news sites and keeps a track of what users have already read. So, users need not switch from page to page for reading new articles, instead, NetNewsWire would provide them with a list of new articles. In 2002, NetNewsWire started as Brent Simmons’ project which was sold in 2005 and again in 2011. Simmons finally re-acquired NetNewsWire from Black Pixel last year, and relaunched it as version 5 this year.  Previously, when NetNewsWire began as a project, it was named as “Evergreen” but later on became NetNewsWire in 2018. In this release of NetNewsWire 5.0, JSON Feed support, syncing via Feedbin, Dark Mode, a “Today” smart feed, starred articles, and more such features are included.  Key features included in NetNewsWire 5.0 Three pane-design As per the image given below, NetNewsWire 5.0 features a common three-pane design where the users’ feed and folders are on the extreme left hand side. The article lists for each of the feeds lie in the middle column, and the readers can view the article in the right column. Image Source: The Sweet Setup Dark mode NNW 5 comes with a light and dark mode that ensures it fits well with macOS’s dark mode support. New buttons The buttons have a design which is similar to the Mac design. This version features buttons that can be used for creating a new folder, sending an article to Safari or marking an article as unread. Smart feed article list  The Smart feed article list features the article title, feed’s icon, a short description from the article, as well as the time the article was published, and the publisher’s name. The “Today” smart feed list shows articles that got published in the last 24 hours instead of the articles that were published post midnight on the current date. Unread articles The unread articles in a feed are marked with a bright blue dot and users can double-click an article in the article list to open it directly in Safari. Keyboard shortcuts Users can now mark all articles in a given feed as “read” by pressing CMD + K. Users can now jump between their smart feeds with the combination of CMD + 1/2/3. Users can also jump to the browser by simply hitting CMD + right arrow key. By hitting the spacebar, users can jump through an article.  What is expected in the future? Support for more services NetNewsWire supports only its own local RSS service and Feedbin. And currently, the local RSS service doesn’t support syncing to any other service. Support for more services is expected in the future.  Read-It-Later Support Apps like Reeder and Fiery Feeds (on iOS) are working on their own read-it-later features as of late and NetNewsWire 5 doesn’t support such kind of feature. iOS version The team is currently working on the iOS version of NetNewsWire. It seems users are overall excited about this release. A user commented on HackerNews, “This looks very good, I'm just waiting for Feedly compatibility.” To know more about this news, check out the official post. What’s new in application development this week? Twilio launched Verified By Twilio, that will show customers who is calling them and why Emacs 26.3 comes with GPG key for GNU ELPA package signature check and more! Introducing ActiveState State Tool, a CLI tool to automate dev & test setups, workflows, share secrets and manage ad-hoc tasks

This month at the Twilio SIGNAL 2019 conference, Twilio, announced Verified By Twilio which help customers to know caller details. Verified By Twilio will also help them know which calls are real and which are fake or spam calls. For this, the company is partnering with major call identification apps like CallApp, Hiya, Robokiller, and YouMail to help more than 200 million consumers. Verified By Twilio is expected to be fully available by early 2020. Verified by Twilio aims to show genuine callers Due to privacy concerns, customers usually tend to reject a number of business calls daily, be it legitimate or illegitimate. As per Hiya’s State of the Phone Call report, Americans answer just a little more than 50% of the calls that they receive on their cell phones. As per a recent Consumer Reports survey, around 70% of consumers do not answer a call if the number flashes up as anonymous.   But in this case, if the customer knows in advance as to who is calling and why then there is a possibility of such business calls not going unanswered. The project Verified by Twilio aims to let users know about why are they getting a call even before they actually press the answer button. It also aims to verify the business or organization that is calling for each of the calls. The official press release reads, “For example, if an airline company is trying to contact a customer about a cancelled flight, as the call comes in, the consumer will see the name of the airline with a short note indicating why they are calling. With that information, that person can make the decision about stepping out of a meeting or putting another call on hold to answer this critically important call.” Jeff Lawson, co-founder and chief executive officer, Twilio, said in a statement, “At Twilio, we want to help consumers take back their phones, so that when their phone rings, they know it's a trusted, wanted call.”  Lawson further added, “A lot of work is being done in the industry to stop unwanted calls and phone scams, and we want to ensure consumers continue to receive the wanted calls. Verified By Twilio is aimed at providing consumers with the context to know who's calling so they answer the important and wanted calls happening in their lives, such as from doctors, schools, and banks.” How Twilio plans to verify businesses? Twilio is now creating a repository for hosting verified information of businesses and organizations as well as their associated brands that will populate the screens as soon as a call comes in. With the programmability of the Twilio platform, it will be possible for businesses and organizations to dynamically assign a purpose for each call to give better context. Twilio plans to involve no costs for businesses and organizations who would want to join the private beta.  With Verified By Twilio, businesses and organizations might improve their overall engagement with their customers as the chances of their calls getting answered would be high and in this way, they would establish trust in traditional communications. To know more about this news, check out the official post. What’s new in Application development this week? Microsoft announces its support for bringing exFAT in the Linux kernel; open sources technical specs Introducing ActiveState State Tool, a CLI tool to automate dev & test setups, workflows, share secrets and manage ad-hoc tasks JavaScript will soon support optional chaining operator as its ECMAScript proposal reaches stage 3

Last week, the team behind Emacs, the customizable libre text editor announced the first release candidate of Emacs 26.3. Again on Wednesday, the team announced a maintenance release, Emacs 26.3. Key features in Emacs 26.3? New GPG key for GNU ELPA Emacs 26.3 now features a new GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) key for GNU ELPA package signature checking (GNU ELPA package is the default package repository for GNU Emacs). New option to help-enable-completion-auto-load This release also features a new option ‘help-enable-completion-auto-load’ that allows users to disable the new feature that was introduced in Emacs 26.1 which was responsible for loading files during the completion of ‘C-h f’ and ‘C-h v’. Supports the Japanese Era name This release now supports the new Japanese Era name. Few users expected more changes in this release, a user commented on HackerNews, “So ... only two relevant changes this time?” While others think that there are editors comparatively better than Emacs. Another user commented, “I don't want to start a flamewar, but I moved most things I was doing in Emacs to Textadept a while back because I found Textadept more convenient. That's not to say TA does everything you can do in Emacs, but it replaced all of the scripting I was doing with Emacs. You have the full power of Lua inside TA. Emacs always has a lag when I start it up, whereas TA is instant. I slowly built up functionality inside TA to the point that I realized I could replace everything I was doing in Emacs.” To know more about this news, check out the mailing thread. What’s new in application development this week? Google Chrome 76 now supports native lazy-loading Introducing ActiveState State Tool, a CLI tool to automate dev & test setups, workflows, share secrets and manage ad-hoc tasks #Reactgate forces React leaders to confront community’s toxic culture head on