Programming News Archives

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.

Rui Ueyama announced the release today of Mold 2.35 as the latest iteration of this high speed linker alternative to the linkers available from the GCC and LLVM toolchain projects.

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

While long overdue, the PostgreSQL database server has finally deprecated MD5 password support with its latest code.

PHP 8.4 is out today as the newest annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language.

FLTK 1.4 is out as the newest version of the Fast Light Toolkit that has been around since the late 90's.

Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 "uutils" has been released for this implementation of the GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better memory safety and greater robustness. With the Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 there is increased GNU compatibility as well as better performance.

Rustls 0.23.17 is out today as the newest version of this modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and a great alternative to the likes of OpenSSL.

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board announced from SC24 that OpenMP 6.0 is now available as a major upgrade to the OpenMP specification for multi-process programming within C / C++ / Fortran. A big emphasis on OpenMP 6.0 is making it easier for developers to embrace.

PHPStan 2.0 is out today as what is the best open-source static analyzer for the PHP programming language.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on Friday by Meta/Facebook provide for sizable performance optimizations for applications leveraging /proc/kcore such as for debuggers.

Near the end of October OpenCL 3.0.17 was released as the newest maintenance update to this low-level compute API for cross-vendor GPUs and other accelerators. The OpenCL Headers and SDK have now been updated for the new revision.

Wasmer 5.0 is now available as the latest major update to this WebAssembly (WASM) runtime focused on being able to allow developers to write "universal apps" that will run anywhere thanks to the power and versatility of WebAssembly.

Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock.

Rustls was initially talked up as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees. But now besides the talked up advantages due to being written in Rust, it has reached the point of reportedly being faster than both OpenSSL and BoringSSL.

For those interested in the prospects of WebAssembly for being able to write "universal apps" that can run anywhere, Wasmer as one of the leading WASM runtimes is closing in on its v5.0 feature release.

Meson 1.6 was published on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular cross-platform build system.

PyTorch 2.5 is out today as the latest major update to this widely-used machine learning library.

It was just last week that Python 3.13 saw its official release with many great features from a new interactive interpreter to an experimental JIT and removing the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental free-threaded build mode. Python 3.14 Alpha 1 is already out today in the first very early stage development milestone toward next year's big Python update.

The OpenBSD project has released LibreSSL 4.0 as the newest version of this open-source TLS implementation that was forked from OpenSSL a decade ago.

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

Following a last minute delay due to a performance regression, Python 3.13 stable is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language implementation.

Git 2.47 is out today as the newest feature release to this immensely popular distributed revision control system.

Wasmer 4.4 is out as the newest version to this prominent WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX / WASI / EmScripten to "run software anywhere" by effectively serving as lightweight containers and being able to scale from the edge to the cloud.

For those wanting to build really nifty and complex text user interfaces (TUIs) for terminal applications, Notcurses is one of the options for maximizing the "terminal bling" with some rather vibrant features that goes well beyond what's offered with the likes of Ncurses. It's been nearly two years since the last release while was surprised today to see out a new version.

The Linux 6.11 kernel introduced getrandom() in the vDSO for faster yet secure user-space random number generation needs. In addition to patches pending for Glibc to make use of getrandom() vDSO support, Golang is now another early user of this functionality.

Python 3.13 had been scheduled for release today with a new interactive interpreter, experimental free-threaded build mode to disable the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), an experimental JIT, and other shiny new features. But a performance regression has delayed the Python 3.13 release to next week and in turn an unexpected Python 3.13-rc3 final test release.

Apache CouchDB 3.4.1 was released today after the developers decided at the last minute before releasing CouchDB 3.4 to drop automatic upgrading of password hashes... Thus CouchDB 3.4.1 is out as the big "CouchDB 3.4" release. The CouchDB 3.4 series brings a number of performance improvements, QuickJS as an alternative to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, and other enhancements.

PostgreSQL 17 is out today as the newest annual feature release to this widely-used SQL database server. Notable with PostgreSQL 17 is having an AVX-512 optimized bit_count function along with several other heavy hitting performance optimizations.

ChipStar 1.2 has been released as the open-source software enabling HIP/CUDA programs to be compiled and run atop SPIR-V whether it be OpenCL or Vulkan drivers.

Miguel Ojeda has submitted all of the Rust toolchain and infrastructure changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support.

OpenJDK 23 is now generally available as the reference implementation to Java 23.

Presented earlier this month at the Open-Source Firmware Conference was TamaGo as a means of running Go programming language code bare metal on Arm SoCs as well as eyeing RISC-V too. TamaGo can allow for "0% C and 100% Go code" for ARM/RISC-V device firmware to enhance security.

Valkey 8.0 was released today as this leading fork of the Redis open-source code that was started by the Linux Foundation early in the year and backed by organizations from Amazon/AWS to Google Cloud, Oracle, and others. With the Valkey 8.0 release a big focus has been on increasing performance and striving to being capable of delivering one million requests per second.

For those continuing to make use of the open-source Redis in-memory, key-value database rather than some of the new open-source forks such as Valkey, the first milestone release of Redis 8.0 Community Edition is now available for testing.

OpenJPH v0.16 has been released as the newest version of this open-source implementation of High-Throughput JPEG2000 (HTJK), also known as JPH / JPEG2000 Part 15. With this new release comes faster performance thanks to making use of Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to complement its existing AVX-512 code.

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.