Swift Adopts the Language Server Protocol
Apple’s Swift team announced they are going to provide support for using Swift with the Language Server Protocol (LSP). This will open up the possibility for developers to use Swift in any editor that supports LSP with code-completion, syntax-highlighting, etc. Apple has just opened the Swift LSP GitHub repository to contributions.
Justin Cormack Explores the Changes, Limitations, and Opportunities within Modern OSs at QCon SF
At QCon San Francisco, Justin Cormack explored “The Operating System in 2018”. The biggest changes in this space include: performance driven improvement, such as eBPF and userspace networking; the changing role of operations, and how operators use and deploy operating systems; and emulation and portability.
IBM to Acquire Red Hat for $34 Billion
IBM announced this afternoon that it will acquire open-source software company Red Hat for $34 billion, the largest deal IBM has ever done, according to Reuters. The deal will help IBM expand its reach as an enterprise cloud computing provider.
Microsoft Joins Open Invention Network with the Aim to Protect Linux and Open Source
Erich Andersen, corporate vice president and chief IP counsel at Microsoft, has announced that Microsoft is joining the Open Invention Network (OIN). This brings it over 60,000 issued patents from Microsoft, aiming to help make its license network even stronger for the benefit of the open source community.
Smoke is a New Lightweight Server-Side Framework for Swift from Amazon
Amazon Smoke framework is a new open-source light-weight server-side framework written in Swift and aimed to build REST-like or RPC-like services. Its architecture stresses ease of use and favours a pure-functional programming style for request handlers.
Microsoft Announces the General Availability of Linux on App Service Environment
Microsoft announced the general availability of Linux on App Service Environment (ASE), which enables customers to combine the features of App Service on Linux and App Service Environment. This release is a follow up on May's public preview, which allowed customers to deploy Linux and containerized apps in an App Service Environment.
Microsoft Quantum Katas Help Developers Discover Quantum Computing with Q#
Based on the idea of code katas, Microsoft has open-sourced a new project called Quantum Katas, that aims to help developers move their first steps in quantum computing using the Q# language. Quantum Katas are a set of programming exercises of growing complexity that provide immediate feedback to learners.
Lazy FP State Restore Vulnerability Affects Most Intel Core CPUs
Intel has disclosed a new vulnerability affecting most of its Core processors and making them targets for side-channel attacks similar to Spectre and Meltdown. The vulnerability, dubbed Lazy FP state restore (CVE–2018–3665), allows a process to infer the contents of FPU/MMX/SSE/AVX registers belonging to other processes.
Apple Open Sources FoundationDB
Apple has open sourced its distributed database core, FoundationDB, which it acquired back in 2015 from the homonymous company. FoundationDB is designed to handle large volumes of data stored across clusters of commodity servers and to favor data consistency by supporting fully global, cross-row ACID transactions.
Swift 4.1 Enhances Generics, Compiler Optimizations, and Package Manager
Swift 4.1 is now officially available, bringing new language features, build options, and a few enhancements to the Swift Package Manager and Foundation.
Swift 4.2 Enters Final Development Stage, Paving the Way for Swift 5
With Swift 4.1 being close to its official release in Xcode 9.3, currently available in beta, the Swift team is now focusing on the next version of the language, Swift 4.2. Besides including bug fixes and improvements to compile-time performance, the new version will further advance work on ABI stability.
Apple Open Source SwiftNIO, a Low-Level Non-Blocking I/O Framework for Swift
At the recent try! Swift Conference in Tokyo, Apple announced the SwiftNIO project, a Netty-like non-blocking cross-platform I/O framework written in Swift.
Swift Has Got Its Discussion Forum
The Swift team has announced the migration of several Swift mailing lists to the Swift Forums, which will be the primary discussion and communication method from now on.
Intel Found That Spectre and Meltdown Fix Has a Performance Hit of 0-21%
Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel have published their performance evaluation of the impact Meltdown and Spectre mitigation has on various systems.
container-diff - an Open Source Tool from Google for Analyzing Differences between Docker Images
Google released an open source project called container-diff which can be used to analyze differences between Docker images. It supports file-system differences and is aware of changes brought about by the apt, npm and pip package managers.
