InfoQ Homepage System Programming Content on InfoQ
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Swift Crypto Brings Apple CryptoKit API to Server-Side Swift
Swift Crypto is a new open-source library for Swift that aims to provide a common API for cryptographic operations on all supported platforms. On macOS, Swift Crypto leverage Apple's CryptoKit framework, while BoringSSL is used for all other platforms.
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Rust Moving Towards an IDE-Friendly Compiler with Rust Analyzer
Rust Analyzer is an experimental IDE/latency-oriented Rust compiler. This is an emerging endeavour within the Rust ecosystem, which is aimed at improving the IDE experience with Rust.
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BLAKE3 Is an Extremely Fast, Parallel Cryptographic Hash
BLAKE3 is the most recent evolution of the BLAKE cryptographic hash function. Created by Jack O'Connor, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Samuel Neves, and Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, BLAKE3 combines general purpose cryptographic tree hash bao with BLAKE2 to provide a big performance improvement over SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3, and BLAKE2.
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Can We Build Trustable Hardware? Andrew Huang at 36C3
Andrew “bunnie” Huang recently presented at 36C3 on ‘Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware’ with an accompanying blog post ‘Can We Build Trustable Hardware?’ His central point is that Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use is very different for hardware versus software, and so open source is less helpful in mitigating the array of potential attacks in the threat model.
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Oxide Computer Company Launch
Jessie Frazelle, Bryan Cantrill and Steve Tuck have announced the launch of Oxide Computer Company to deliver ‘hyperscaler infrastructure for the rest of us’. The company aims to tackle the ‘infrastructure privilege’ presently enjoyed by hyperscale operators by developing ‘software to manage a full rack from first principles’, including platform firmware.
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Microsoft Exploring Rust as the Solution for Safe Software
Microsoft has been recently experimenting with Rust to improve the safety of their software. In a talk at RustFest Barcelona, Microsoft engineers Ryan Levick and Sebastian Fernandez explained the challenges they faced in using Rust at Microsoft. Part of Microsoft's journey with Rust included rewriting a low-level Windows component, as Adam Burch explained.
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Google Updates Google App Engine with More New Runtimes: Node.js 12, Go 1.13, PHP 7.3 and Python 3.8
In a recent blog post, Google announced several new runtimes for the App Engine service on its cloud platform. These runtimes are Node.js 12, Go 1.13, PHP 7.3 and Python 3.8.
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Rust Gets Zero-Cost Async/Await Support in Rust 1.39
After getting support for futures in version 1.36, Rust has finally stabilized async/.await in version 1.39. As Rust core team member Niko Matsakis explains, contrary to other languages, async/.await is a zero-cost abstraction in Rust.
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PARSEC Is a New Platform-Agnostic API for Secure Systems
Backed by Arm and Docker, Platform AbstRaction for SECurity aims to define a universal software standard to handle secure object storage and cryptography services. It focuses on modern system architectures made of containerized services and strives to make security technology easy to access. InfoQ has spoken with Justin Cormack, security lead at Docker and PARSEC maintainer, to learn more.
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C++20 Feature List Now Frozen: Modules, Coroutines, and Concepts are in; Contracts out
The ISO C++ Committee has closed the feature list for the next C++ standard, dubbed C++20, scheduled to be published by February 2020. C++20 will be a significant revision of C++, bringing modules, coroutines, and concepts, among its major new features.
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Rust 1.36 Stabilizes Futures, Backports Non-Lexical Lifetimes, and More
Following its roadmap to Rust 2018, Rust 1.36's most awaited new feature is support for the Future trait, which is the first step towards bringing async/await to the language. Additionally, it backports non-lexical lifetimes (NLL) to improve the borrow checker, and introduces a new alloc crate to enable the creation of memory allocation-dependent libraries that do not require std.
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Sonic: A Lightweight, Schema-Less Search
Sonic is an open source, lightweight, schema-less search backend promoted as an alternative to full-feature search systems such as Elasticsearch. Sonic can normalize natural language search queries, provide auto-complete, and return the most relevant results for a search query.
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MIT Debuts Gen, a Julia-Based Language for Artificial Intelligence
In a recent paper, MIT researchers introduced Gen, a general-purpose probabilistic language based on Julia aimed to allow users to express models and create inference algorithms using high-level programming constructs.
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Interfacing Elixir with Rust to Improve Performance: Discord's Story
When the Discord team hit a hard-limit on BEAM's performance dealing with large data structures, they resorted to interfacing Elixir with Rust to make their system able to scale up to 11 million concurrent users.
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Microsoft Introduces Bosque, a Programming Language for Writing Easy-to-Reason-about Code
Microsoft has recently introduced the Bosque programming language, an investigative language design research project for writing code that is simple, obvious, and easy-to-reason-about for both humans and machines. The language derives from a combination of TypeScript inspired syntax and types, plus ML and Node/JavaScript inspired semantics.