Last month the initial infrastructure for allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the Linux kernel landed in the Linux-Next tree for more widespread testing ahead of its possible inclusion in the mainline kernel. Now a "request for comments" has been started again on the kernel mailing list around the prospects of Rust code for the Linux kernel.

Google engineers are responsible for a number of programming languages like Go and Dart while their newest one to be made public is Logica.

While most haven't even moved to PHP 8.0 yet in their Linux distribution default packages let alone in production environments, PHP 8.1 is under development and like clockwork should be out around the end of November as usual for their yearly release dance. In two months already the PHP 8.1 alpha releases should start up.

The PHP programming language's self-hosted Git server was compromised on Sunday and two malicious commits introduced.

OpenBLAS 0.3.14 is out today as the newest version of this open-source BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) library that continues to work on maximizing the performance for x86_64 and other architectures.

Zlib-ng 2.0 is out today as the first stable release of this zlib fork focused on "next generation" systems with speedier performance and a more modern API, among other changes.

Java 16 is out today in the form of the OpenJDK 16 general availability release.

Git 2.31 is out today as the newest version of this distributed revision control system.

Binomial's Basis Universal GPU texture codec for highly-compressed textures is now even faster when ETC1S encoding to this intermediate format.

While there has been 7-Zip file support on Linux via the p7zip project, the upstream 7-Zip 21.01 Alpha release has finally introduced native Linux support.

GitLab is following the same approach of GitHub and others in now using "main" as the default branch name for new Git repositories.

An editor's draft for post-Spectre web development guidance was made available by the W3C.

Disclosed today is CVE-2021-21300 as a security vulnerability affecting git clone that could lead to specially crafted repositories being able to execute code during the Git clone process.

PyTorch 1.8 was released on Thursday as the newest version of this widely-used machine learning library. Exciting many will be easier AMD Radeon ROCm support with Python wheels now provided for that Radeon Open eCosystem support.

Zstd 1.4.9 is out today as the latest version of this implementation for the Facebook-led Zstandard lossless data compression algorithm. With Zstd 1.4.9 comes a very sizable speed-up when running in its long distance mode.

The Mercurial distributed revision control system continues to see use particularly around some large code-base projects and the developers continue working to optimize its performance in part by transitioning more of it to the Rust programming language.

Mozilla has been sponsoring the Rust programming language for more than a decade while in 2020 as part of Mozilla's big round of layoffs most of the Rust team was let go along with dropping the Servo web engine team. Following that plans were drafted to create the Rust Foundation as an independent entity.

With this past week's release of Pyston 2.1 as an alternative Python interpreter I was curious to see how the performance compared to that of upstream Python... So here are some weekend benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system.

Pyston started out as a fork of CPython and was very promising during its early days as a Dropbox project for delivering on high performance Python. Its performance was great but in 2017 Dropbox stopped supporting it. Then at the end of 2020, Pyston reappeared and Pyston 2.0 promoted ~20% faster performance than Python 3.8. Pyston 2.x was developed by many of the original developers from Dropbox now out working on their own firm.

In addition to Oracle's GraalVM 21.0 being released this week, the Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 v0.24 as the newest feature release for their high performance JVM.

The eBPF in-kernel virtual machine that allows for handling sandboxed "programs" within the Linux kernel continues on its stellar upward trajectory.

The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM.

The POWER10 architecture is adding several new instructions to help prevent return-oriented programming exploits.

While Fedora has been well known for years in always shipping the very latest packages in its distribution as of release even if it means using the likes of a near-final GCC compiler pre-release, developers have decided to postpone the shipping of PHP 8.0 until the autumn with their Fedora 35 release.

Alibaba developers released an updated version of their "blazing fast" lightweight deep learning framework MNN, or the Mobile Neural Network.

As we have been expecting in recent weeks, Wasmer 1.0 has been released as the "universal WebAssembly runtime" for helping to accelerate WASM adoption and new use-cases outside of the web browser.

Rust 1.49 was released today for ending out 2020 with this popular programming language. Most notable with Rust 1.49 is the 64-bit ARM Linux support state being promoted.

Git 2.30 is out today as the latest stable release update of this wildly-popular, distributed revision control system.

After a half-decade working toward it, Ruby 3.0 was released on Christmas Day with much greater performance and other features for this high-level general purpose programming language.

It's looking like Wasmer 1.0 will be released early in the new year as the open-source WebAssembly run-time for desktops or to run WASM code anywhere as a "universal runtime" in contexts outside of the web browser.