Programming News Archives

Cairo 1.18.2 released this week nearly one year after Cairo 1.18's debut for this cross-platform 2D vector graphics library -- in turn that was the project's first stable release in five years. Cairo is important for the GTK toolkit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, and dozens of other software projects. With Cairo 1.18.2 there are many fixes that have accumulated over the past year for bettering this graphics library.

Wireshark 4.4 has been released as the newest version of this leading network protocol analyzer. Wireshark 4.4 brings many new and improved features.

Codon is an open-source project that leverages the LLVM compiler infrastructure and aims for super fast Python code with as much as 10~100x speedups. Released this week was Codon 0.17 as the newest step forward for this alternative Python implementation.

Zed, the code/text editor being developed by former Atom editor developers, has continued to gain interest among developers since going open-source, being written in the Rust programming language, and native Linux builds taking shape. The latest feature work on Zed is beginning to integrate AI-powered functionality by leveraging Anthropic's Claude LLM.

A new version of Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available for this high performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM)

OpenBLAS 0.3.28 made it out today as the open-source optimized BLAS library that caters to a wide range of processors spanning various architectures. With this OpenBLAS 0.3.28 release are yet more optimizations and new CPU optimized paths.

Dragonfly 1.21 released today as the newest version of this modern, drop-in replacement to Redis and Memcached. This performance-optimized in-memory data store has added a few interesting features with the new release.

Mold 2.33 is out as the newest version of this high speed linker as an alternative to the likes of GNU Gold and LLVM LLD. With Mold 2.33 there are still new performance optimizations being worked out by lead developer Rui Ueyama.

For those making use of JSON data with the PostgreSQL database server, now merged code to make use of SIMD for JSON escaping has shown up to a 4x improvement for query performance when dealing with lots of JavaScript Object Notation data.

One of the many exciting features merged for Linux 6.11 is getrandom() in the vDSO for very fast yet secure random number generation. Now that the kernel bits have landed, it's on to making use of it in the GNU C Library and other libc implementations.

AdaptiveCpp as the open-source compiler formerly known as hypSYCL and Open SYCL is out with a new feature release for this C++ heterogeneous compiler supporting all major CPUs and GPUs.

The latest Rust for the Linux kernel work led by Miguel Ojeda is on preparing the Rust kernel code for various CPU security mitigations.

Pingora started out as an in-house replacement to Cloudflare's Nginx usage that was written in Rust and eventually open-sourced earlier this year. Pingora has evolved into a Rust framework for building fast and reliable networked systems. Ending out the week is the release of Pingora 0.3 as the latest step forward for this Rust code that is widely used within the confines of Cloudflare.

Git 2.46-rc0 was published on Friday as the first tagged development release on the trek toward Git 2.46.

The Mold linker is already a high-speed alternative to the likes of LLVM LLD and GNU Gold. Its performance is very impressive while those using it while carrying out debug builds have the ability to achieve an insane speed-up thanks to a new option.

LPython is an in-development open-source project aiming to be a very fast Python compiler with multiple back-ends. Released this week was LPython 0.22 as the latest step in this crusade.

Nearly every Linux kernel cycle has bought patches to bump the version of the Rust language targeted by the kernel as it worked toward having a suitable minimum version. With the latest Linux kernel patches, it looks like we may be finally approaching the point where a safe minimum version can be specified and for the Linux kernel to in turn allow supporting multiple different versions of the Rust compiler.

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.27 as the newest feature update to this Rust-written, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils as the common set of utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms.

The Portable Computing Language "PoCL" that started off as a CPU-based OpenCL implementation has grown to support multiple hardware targets from NVIDIA PTX to Intel Level Zero to AMD ROCm and other innovations like a recent remote driver for transparent OpenCL across networked systems. PoCL 6.0 was released today for delivering the latest enhancements to this independent OpenCL compute implementation and continuing to enhance support for its different hardware targets.

NumPy 2.0 was released on Sunday that's been in the making for the past year and their first major release since 2006. While it comes with API/ABI breakage, NumPy 2.0 delivers new features and performance improvements.

In aiming to make the Rust programming language more suitable for safety-critical software like within automobiles, aviation, and other industries, the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium was announced today.

Google is known for their many contributions to open-source compilers and particular many different sanitizer efforts over the years. Their newest project they have made open-source in this area is GWPSan as a sampling-based sanitizer framework.

Mold 2.32 is out as the newest feature release for this high speed code linker that rivals LLVM LLD and GNU Gold.

The second beta is now available for testing of the upcoming Python 3.13 release that is bringing an experimental JIT, a new interactive interpreter, and other big features for this annual Python feature release.

OpenCV 4.10 is out today as the newest version of the Open Computer Vision Library for this widely-used library with machine learning support, object detection, segmentation and recognition, motion video tracking, gesture recognition, and a variety of other features important for today's diverse workloads.

QuestDB 8.0 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source time-series database. QuestDB continues to cater to high throughput ingestion and fast SQL queries so it can handle use-cases from financial data to IoT sensors. With today's QuestDB 8.0 release, it's even faster.

The Mozilla Ocho group has published their newest version of Llamafile, the open-source project that makes it very easy to distribute and run large language models (LLMs) as a single file. Llamafile is an excellent solution for easily sharing and running LLMs and supporting both speedy CPU-based execution as well as GPU acceleration where available.

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" OpenCL implementation that originally began as a CPU-based run-time and has expanded to support a variety of GPU and accelerator targets is out with its first release candidate of the upcoming PoCL 6.0.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.45 is now available as the newest version of this high performance JVM for Java applications.

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.