Programming News Archives

Following Oracle releasing an updated GraalVM this week, released yesterday was a new version of Eclipse OpenJ9 for this high performance, open-source JVM.

Today marks the ramp-down phase one point for JDK 21 where the OpenJDK code is forked from mainline for this de facto Java 21 implementation. Making OpenJDK 21 all the more exciting is this is going to be one of Oracle's bi-annual Long-Term Support (LTS) releases.

The open-source uutils project that is striving to be a drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils but written within the Rust programming language is out today with a new feature update.

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" began as an open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation that has become quite a comprehensive implementation over the years. But in leveraging the LLVM/Clang compiler stack, over time PoCL has grown beyond just a CPU implementation to also support OpenCL execution on NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA-capable GPUs, and more. The latest now coming with PoCL 4.0 is support for Intel Level Zero execution for running this OpenCL implementation over Intel Arc Graphics GPUs.

PostgreSQL 16 is up to its first beta milestone today with new performance optimizations and continued security enhancements.

The first beta release of Python 3.12 is now available that also marks the beginning of the feature freeze for this year's major Python update.

SQLite 3.42 is now available as the newest update to this widely-used, embed-friendly SQL database option that is used by countless applications and other software for lightweight and speedy data storage purposes.

The PXP project has been an interesting language effort in recent times that aims to become a superset of PHP with additional syntax options and greater run-time capabilities. PXP 0.0.1 was released yesterday as the first very early, pre-production release for this open-source project.

A new release of TornadoVM is now available, the open-source plug-in to OpenJDK and GraalVM to allow for Java code to run on heterogeneous hardware with ease -- including various GPU models as well as FPGAs.

With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software.

Rust 1.69 is out today as stable as the newest update to this increasingly popular programming language that has become passionate to many open-source developers for its memory safety guarantees and other principles.

The Hero C Compiler "HCC" wants to make it easy to compile C code to run on GPUs by compiling common C11 code and turning it into SPIR-V modules that can then be consumed by GPUs with Vulkan support.

Wasmer as the open-source project focused on providing a "universal WebAssembly runtime" that supports a variety of platforms and architectures is out today with a new feature release.

Libuv as the cross-platform asynchronous I/O library that is used by the likes of Node.js, Julia, and other software packages now has support for making use of IO_uring on Linux.

A new release of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance JVM implementation previously developed as IBM J9.

One of several notable open-source projects to rewrite key Linux software components with the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language is uutils as an alternative to GNU Coreutils. Released this weekend was uutils v0.0.18 that continues to enhance compatibility with the upstream GNU Coreutils programs.

Apache IoTDB 1.1 has been released today as this database for the "Internet of Things" as a high performance time-series database solution. Like with most time-series databases, ApAche IoTDB aims to provide a high performance solution for data management and analysis from the edge to the cloud with high throughput, efficient data storage, and robust open-source software integration.

A new release of OpenBLAS is now available, the open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its wide variety of processor optimizations.

Promoted to general availability (GA) status today is the OpenJDK Java 20 update with a number of new features.

While there is Pyston, PyPy, and various other alternative Python implementations being done in the name of performance, Codon is one of the newer ones and is talking up 10~100x faster performance.

Mold 1.11 is out as the newest version of this open-source high performance linker that rivals the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold for very speedy linking across multiple CPU architectures.

Following the PyTorch Foundation talking up PyTorch 2.0 since the end of last year, today marks the PyTorch 2.0 release officially shipping. PyTorch 2.0 has significant optimizations to "supercharge" it with better performance for both CPU and GPU modes of operation.

Back in 2021 Ruby merged the YJIT just-in-time compiler that last year with Ruby 3.2 was deemed production grade. There's also been the MJIT compiler that relies upon an external C compiler. And now landing this week in Ruby is RJIT as the newest just-in-time effort.

Python 3.12 Alpha 6 was released on Tuesday as the newest development release toward this next major Python release.

Coming about over the past two years has been uutils as a re-implementation of GNU Coreutils written within the Rust programming language. This Rust-based version of cp, mv, and other core utilities is reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses.

Google has released a new version of the Go programming language that with today's v1.20 release come a number of notable additions as well as gutting out support for older versions of Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS. Two features alone have me excited about Go 1.20: initial work on CPU architecture feature build flags like for x86_64 micro-architecture feature level handling and initial support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) builds.

TornadoVM is an open-source plugin for OpenJDK and GraalVM that allows for running Java programs on heterogeneous hardware like GPUs and FPGAs. With today's TornadoVM 0.15, it's the first release now supporting discrete Intel Arc Graphics hardware.

Mold 1.10 was released today by lead developer Rui Ueyama as the newest version of this high speed linker that has been outperforming GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out.

Mold as the high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD is out with another feature release.

The Tellusim Engine that is focused on professional simulations, visualizations, urban planning, VR/AR, and other 3D tasks has added a comprehensive set of Rust programming language bindings.

OpenCV 4.7 was released today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source computer vision library.

It's been one year and a few days since the introduction of Mold 1.0 as a high performance linker alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD while debuting today is Mold 1.8 as the newest feature release.

As a timely gift to programmers using the speedy and very successful Meson build system, the Meson 1.0 stable release has debuted just in time for Christmas. Besides the holiday, today is also notable in marking ten years to the day since Meson started development.

Embark Studios has released a new version of Rust-GPU that has a goal of making Rust a first-class programming language and ecosystem for GPU shader development.

While Linux 6.1 merged the initial Rust infrastructure, in this kernel version set to be released as stable today there isn't any Rust-based functionality for end-users. With v6.1 it's just some of the initial code for building up the Rust programming language support and it's continuing that way for Linux 6.2. The pull request of more Rust enablement has already been sent out for the Linux 6.2 merge window.

PHP 8.2 is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language primarily for web purposes.

The GCC Rust front-end that provides very preliminary support for the Rust programming language atop the GNU Compiler Collection is now cleared for merging to the mainline codebase!

PoCL 3.1 is nearing release as the "Portable Computing Language" that is most known for serving as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation but via its LLVM usage also allows supporting OpenCL execution atop NVIDIA CUDA and other targets.

Following the development builds over the summer, Wasmer 3.0 was officially released this weekend as the newest feature release for this open-source software aiming to serve as a universal WebAssembly runtime with a goal to "run any code on any client" via WebAssembly.

While Microsoft is celebrating the GA release today of SQL Server 2022, open-source developers have SQLite 3.40 premiering today as the newest version of this embed-friendly SQL database implementation widely used by many cross-platform applications and other software for lightweight SQL database engine needs.

IBM is working to extend Power10's MMA architecture with a new feature for "dense math" that is expected to premiere with future IBM Power processors.

Mold is the modern, high performance, and open-source linker taking on the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.7 has been released as the newest update to this very promising linker, but unfortunately the lead developer is evaluating a license change. Due to still losing money over working on it full-time, he may be forced to change the software license without obtaining sustainable funding.

Debuting on Sunday was Meson 0.64 as the newest version of this open-source build system that is increasingly being used by a variety of software projects for its speed, good cross-platform support, and overall feature set compared to alternatives.

Back in September was a proposal to promote Rust's UEFI firmware targets to tier-2. With the current tier-3 designation the Rust UEFI targets they currently lack continuous integration (CI) guarantees and official builds in the Rust release channels, which means users wanting to use Rust for targeting the UEFI binaries need to rely on nightly/unstable compiler builds.

In addition to this week having brought the announcement of GraalVM 22.3 as the newest quarterly feature release and also Oracle announcing that GraalVM CE code will be contributed to OpenJDK, the Eclipse Foundation is ending out their week by having shipped OpenJ9 v0.35.0.

Python 3.11 stable is out today as a rather big update for this popular scripting language.

Mold as the open-source high performance linker continues its ascent in working to prove itself as a viable alternative to LLVM's LLD and GNU Gold. Mold 1.6 is out today with the latest fixes and features.

Longtime open-source developer Keith Packard has announced the release of Picolibc 1.7.9, the newest version of his C library for embedded systems. Picolibc 1.7.9 adds support for several new CPU architectures and other enhancements for his miniature libc implementation.

Among the many Rust-written projects that have been gaining steam in recent years has been uutils as a Rust-based replacement to GNU Coreutils that is commonly used on Linux systems. Out today is uutils 0.0.16 as the latest step in this Rust-replacement quest.