Swift 4.1 Brings Conditional Conformance and More
Swift 4.1, available in Xcode 9.3, brings a number of improvements to the language, including automatic implementation of the Equatable and Hashable protocols, conditional conformance, and more.
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.
Apple Getting Ready to Deprecate 32-Bit macOS Apps
Apple has started preparing the deprecation of 32-bit apps for macOS. The next maintenance release of macOS, High Sierra 10.13.4, will notify users when they launch 32-bit apps, while the upcoming Xcode 9.3 will include tools to make the transition to 64-bit less painful for developers.
Google Releases Puppeteer 1.0
Puppeteer 1.0 has been released and includes dozens of improvements, including measurement of JavaScript heap and page performance, and code coverage information for JavaScript and CSS.
ARKit 1.5 Now Supports Vertical Surface Detection and 2D Image Recognition
Apple has announced a major upgrade of ARKit, which is available to developers with iOS 11.3 beta. According to Apple, ARKit 1.5 will allow developers to build more immersive augmented reality (AR) experiences.
Microsoft Announces General Availability of PowerShell Core 6.0
Microsoft has announced the general availability of PowerShell Core 6.0, a new edition of PowerShell. Version 6.0 supports various platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux), is open-sourced, and built for heterogeneous environments and the hybrid cloud.
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.
Meltdown and Spectre: What They Are and How to Deal with Them
This article discusses the latest CPU vulnerabilities – Meltdown and Spectre – and the current solutions to fix them.
W3C Releases HTML 5.2 As Official Recommendation
The W3C released the HTML 5.2 update to the HTML specification as an official recommendation on December 14, 2017. This update adds new features like the dialog element, obsoletes old ones like the HTML plugins system, and integrates work from other W3C committees such as support for the Payments Request API and the Presentation API.
Google to Improve Security and Privacy of Google Play Apps
Android developers will have to comply with two new requirements if they want their apps to be available on Google Play in the future. Those include supporting a recent Android version and adding support for 64-bit native code. Additionally, Google will start including some security metadata to improve APK authenticity verification.
Firefox Quantum Commits to Cross-Browser Extension Architecture
With the Firefox 57 “Quantum” release, Firefox now only supports extensions based on the WebExtensions API, joining Chrome and Edge in supporting extension development with pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript based on a cross-browser shared extension architecture.
Final Android 8.1 Oreo Brings Oreo Go for Low-Memory Devices
A month after becoming available as a developer preview, Android 8.1 Oreo 8.1 has reached its final release. In addition to what InfoQ already reported, with Oreo 8.1 comes the new Android Oreo (Go edition) configuration that is specifically targeting low-memory devices.
WebAssembly Now Supported across All Browsers
With releases on September 19 for Safari and October 31 for Edge, Apple and Microsoft join Google and Mozilla in providing support for WebAssembly in production browsers. All four companies’ browsers can now run code compiled to the wasm binary format.
Kotlin Native Adds Objective-C Interop, WebAssembly Support
Kotlin/Native 0.4 makes it possible to build native apps for iOS and macOS, writes Nikolay Igotti, Kotlin/Native tech lead at JetBrains. Additionally, it introduces experimental support for the WebAssembly platform.
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.
