Programming News Archives

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result.

There's another Rust upgrade coming for the Linux 6.10 kernel to bump the Rust version baseline required for building the Rust in-tree kernel components. This raising of the baseline will continue until a suitable minimum version is achieved where official Rust compiler "just works" well with the Rust'ed kernel bits. The Rust upgrade in Linux 6.10 also does away with its in-tree "alloc" fork for big code savings and simplifying maintenance.

Two years ago Cloudflare outlined how they began replacing Nginx with their own in-house creation, Pingora. Back in February of this year Cloudflare open-sourced Pingora and in April issued the maiden release of Pingora. Out today is Pingora 0.2 as the second release of this Rust framework that is already used in production by Cloudflare.

Wasmer 4.3 is out as the newest version of this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX, WASI, and EmScript execution. This cross-platform WASM runtime continues to be focused on driving lightweight containers that can run anywhere in a very secure manner.

For fans of SQLite and/or new database solutions, Limbo is an in-development, open-source OLTP database management system that is compatible with SQLite while written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux's IO_uring for async I/O.

The first beta of Python 3.13 is now available for testing ahead of its official release later this year.

Rui Ueyama announced the release of Mold 2.31 today as the newest version of this high speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

TornadoVM 1.0.4 is out today as the newest version of this solution for Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators. TornadoVM allows for nice Java heterogeneous hardware support and with the TornadoVM 1.0.4 brings yet more features.

Junio Hamano announced the release today of Git 2.45-rc0 as the first test release toward the next version of this distributed version control system. Notable with Git 2.45 is beginning to land SHA1 and SHA256 interoperability work for repositories.

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."

As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing "the best possible performance" especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages.

Back in 2022 Cloudflare began talking about replacing Nginx with their own in-house, Rust-written code called Pingora, talked about Pingora more in 2023, and then this past February made this Pingora framework open-source for creating reliable and fast networked systems. Today marks the first official release of Pingora with the v0.1 tag.

OpenBLAS 0.3.27 is out as the newest version of this prominent open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library.

For years the PostgreSQL database server has been adding various JSON features while now the latest addition for dealing with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) structured data is the JSON_TABLE() SQL function.

In addition to the Linux Foundation and others starting Valkey as a fork of the open-source Redis following the upstream move to dual source-available licensing, Redict is another new fork getting established.

A new release of Llamafile is available this Easter Sunday from the Mozilla Ocho group. Llamafile is a means of distributing and running large language models (LLMs) from a single file, making LLMs much easier to distribute and use by developers and end-users. Llamafile remains one of the more interesting non-browser projects out of Mozilla in recent times that so far has a bright future.

Simon McVittie issued the Flatpak 1.15.7 pre-release on Wednesday with a few notable changes for this widely-used open-source app sandboxing and distribution framework.

TornadoVM is the OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that opens up the Java programming language to heterogeneous hardware support by allowing the easy targeting of Java code to TornadoVM targets including OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V -- in addition to CPUs. With the SPIR-V and OpenCL support in turn this means Java can run not only on GPUs but also some FPGAs and other devices.

Out this weekend is a new version of uutils' Coreutils 0.0.25 as the Rust-written drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils for common utilities found on Linux platforms and other systems.

Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22.

Mold 2.30 is out this weekend as the newest version of this open-source high speed linker alternative to GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD.

Some Phoronix readers have been interested in Slint as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that offers a royalty-free license and in addition to desktop ambitions has also been porting to Android. Slint 1.5 was released today and in addition to the Rust programming language support has begun offering a Python API.

AdaptiveCpp 24.02 is out this week as the newest version of this SYCL compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL. AdaptiveCpp supports C++-based heterogeneous programming models targeting all major CPU and GPU vendors thanks to SYCL and C++ standard parallelism.

Musl libc 1.2.5 released on Thursday as the newest version of this lightweight, speedy, and free software C library implementation that is popular for embedded use, containers, and elsewhere.

The Mold high performance linker has long been known for offering excellent performance over GNU Gold/ld and LLVM lld while some fresh benchmark numbers reinforce the competitive advantage that persists today for this open-source project.

GLFW 3.4 has been released as this open-source, multi-platform library used for OpenGL / OpenGL ES / Vulkan development via a platform-independent API. GLFW 3.4 continues supporting Linux, macOS, Windows, and other platforms for offering this nice abstracted solution around graphics and input.

Git maintainer Junio Hamano on Friday released Git 2.44 as the newest update to this leading open-source distributed revision control system.

With Linux 6.8 the kernel's Rust code was brought up to Rust 1.75 while new patches posted this weekend port the code over to Rust 1.76 and then the upcoming Rust 1.77.

When it comes to open-source compiler toolchain components and more broadly often unsung heroes in the low-level open-source space, one of the most interesting successes in recent years has been the Mold linker that has proven itself a viable alternative to GNU ld and Gold or LLVM's lld linkers. Mold is already in great shape and typically proving itself well while moving ahead they are working toward kernel/embedded programming support as one of the last grounds to tackle.

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high-performance Java Virtual Machine formerly developed by IBM as the J9 VM.

ChipStar 1.1 was released this past week as one of the open-source projects to help in porting HIP and CUDA applications to support the industry-standard SPIR-V. ChipStar acts to get HIP/CUDA codes working on SPIR-V with OpenCL or Intel's oneAPI Level Zero.

The uutils project providing a Rust-written Coreutils re-implementation has released v0.0.24 and it passes another 29 GNU test cases as the project nears its 1.0 release.

The Zed code editor being led by the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework have announced today that the Zed editor is being open-sourced.

The third alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for testing as the developers continue work on removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and enhancing the overall performance of this scripting language.

SQLite 3.45 was released today with the SQLITE_DIRECT_OVERFLOW_READ optimization being enabled by default that can help for apps relying on SQLite and doing a lot of reads of large BLOBs or strings deliver better read performance. There are also query planner improvements while most interesting with SQLite 3.45 is all JSON functions being rewritten to use the new JSONB format.

There seems to be two classes of people when reminiscing over Adobe Flash: those that were fond of Flash-games of the time from many years ago and those that cringe over recalling Flash ads and other content requiring that prior proprietary Macromedia/Adobe tech. For those that have good memories from Adobe Flash, the Ruffle open-source project continues working to this day on an Adobe Flash Player emulator.

The latest open-source project eyeing the possibility of beginning to allow the Rust programming language to be used within its codebase is the Git project.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.42 released this week as the high performance Java Virtual Machine spun out from the IBM J9 JVM.

OpenBLAS 0.3.26 was released this week as the newest feature update to this open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library.

For those making use of the Newlib C standard library for embedded systems, Red Hat kicked off the new year by releasing Newlib 4.4.

OpenCV 4.9 released on Friday as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision (CV) library.

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

For those still relying on GNU Autoconf for generating configure scripts for building/installing/packaging software rather than more modern alternatives like CMake and Meson, Autoconf 2.72 is out today as a nice holiday treat.

Cling 1.0 was released this week for this open-source interactive C++ interpreter that builds atop LLVM/Clang. Cling is implemented as an extension to LLVM/Clang to serve as an interpeter leveraging the read-eval-print loop (REPL) concept and relies on just-in-time (JIT) compilation.

SQLite as the leading open-source embedded database solution has landed JSONB, a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that can be up to "several times faster" than the existing JSON functions.

TornadoVM 1.0 has been released as the open-source software providing an OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in for allowing Java on heterogeneous hardware from multi-core CPUs to GPUs and FPGAs. TornadoVM allows targeting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V devices for a rather robust array of hardware support.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.41 debuted this week as the newest version of this OpenJDK JVM focused on a small footprint and fast performance.

PHP 8.3 is out today as the latest major annual update to the PHP programming language.

The uutils open-source project continues working on re-implementing the widely-used GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better security and a fresh take on rm, cd, cat, ls, and other commands.

Slint as a reminder is a Rust-written open-source graphical toolkit that on Linux uses Qt currently underneath. Slint has been making good progress on its goals and today marks the availability of Slint 1.3.