Programming News Archives

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.

Merged one year ago was the initial Rust code for the Linux kernel back in Linux 6.1. We're now up to the Linux 6.7 development cycle and the enabling of more kernel functionality so it can be used/accessed from Rust code remains ongoing along with continuing to bump the base toolchain requirements and other functionality to make it more practical to write future Linux device drivers within this memory safe programming language.

AdaptiveCpp 23.10 has been released for this open-source project formerly known as hipSYCL and OpenSYCL for aiming to provide an open-source project around SYCL and C++ standard parallelism that can target all major CPU and GPU platforms.

Mold 2.3 was released today by Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high-speed linker alternative to LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

Released on Sunday was uutils 0.0.22 as the open-source software aiming to be a drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils while being written in the Rust programming language for memory safety, better performance, and a modernized codebase.

While Python 3.12 was just released earlier this month, already the first alpha release of Python 3.13 is now available for early-stage testing and evaluation.

Roman Gilg who is known for his work on the KWinFT compositor project has spent the past few years quietly developing FDBuild as a new tool for developers to easily pull, configure, and build multiple software projects via a single command. This week he released FDBuild 0.1 as the first public release of this handy utility.

Ferrous Systems has made available open-source code for Ferrocene, their Rust compiler focused on safety-critical and mission-critical environments. The Ferrocene compiler is being made available under Apache 2.0 or MIT licensing.

Python 3.12 is out today as the latest major feature release for this extremely popular programming language. Python 3.12 continues the trend of recent releases of enhancing the performance while continuing to introduce exciting new functionality.

Rui Ueyama published today a new version of Mold, the open-source high speed linker that has easily outpaced the common linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects. Mold 2.2 continues work on its performance quest, expanding its multiple CPU architectures supported, and other new work.

Java 21 and the JDK 21 release under a general availability (GA) status occurred a short time ago as the newest major update to the Java programming language.