Programming News Archives

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.

Version 3.3.3 of the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is now available for this Java library that makes it easy to utilize native APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to OpenCL compute and other OS APIs within Java's confines. LWJGL is used for Java games and can also be used with other Java software looking for rich API support particularly around GPU integration.

PoCL began as an open-source project providing a CPU-based OpenCL implementation and over the years has added support for various LLVM back-ends such as for targeting AMD HSA, Intel Level Zero, and NVIDIA CUDA/PTX with its OpenCL implementation. The latest back-end merged ahead of Portable Computing Language 5.0 is a remote back-end that allows for OpenCL codes to be transparently utilized on networked systems for distributed computing.

OpenBLAS 0.3.24 is now available for this latest open-source BLAS and LAPACK implementation known for its advanced CPU optimizations and extensive tuning for providing for very speedy linear algebra kernels.

The first release candidate of PHP 8.3 is now available for testing this annual feature release.

SQLite 3.43 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source embedded SQL database library that is widely used by countless applications and other software for a variety of data storage purposes.

Git 2.42 is out today as the newest feature update for this dominant open-source distributed revision control system.

Released last week was Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.40 as the latest feature update to this high performance JVM that focuses on being optimized for a small footprint.

Last month the Mold 2.0 high-speed linker was released that shifted from AGPL to MIT licensing after their monetization strategy didn't pan out. This weekend the project is out with its Mold 2.1 release as another step forward for this alternative linker to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

Go 1.21 is now available as the latest version of this popular programming language.

Available now for testing is the release candidate of Python 3.12 ahead of its formal release later this year.

LPython is the latest open-source Python implementation aiming to be a very performant version of Python among other interesting features.

Mold 2.0 is out today as a major update to this high performance linker developed by Rui Ueyama. Mold has consistently shown to outperform GNU's Gold and LLVM's LLD linkers while today is making another shift with it now turning to MIT licensing.

Prior to LLVM/Clang becoming so popular within organizations and it maturing well on x86_64, AArch64, and other architectures, Open64 was once quite popular in areas now dominated by LLVM and GCC. Open64 had been popular with academic researchers, AMD even maintained their Open64 optimized compiler a decade prior to the LLVM-based AOCC, and was quite popular in the HPC space. Surprisingly there's been some recent activity on the Open64 compiler code.

The uutils project continues advancing as a modern, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils utilities that is written in the Rust programming language.

After being in development for more than one year, Perl 5.38 released today as the latest feature update to this programming language.