PHP 7.4 is out this US Thanksgiving day as the newest feature release for the PHP scripting language. PHP 7.4 comes with a number of prominent language additions while, yes, also having even better performance on the PHP series.

With the big PHP 7.4.0 release due out next week, yesterday we published our PHP 7.4.0 benchmarks using the near-final build for this annual update to PHP. Those benchmarks compared previous releases as far back as PHP 5.6. But out of curiosity after that article I went to do some benchmarks going back to PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.0-dev.

Since Intel announced "oneAPI" last December we have been eagerly looking forward to its availability and today is finally that day! For SC19, Intel has made available the beta of the oneAPI Base Toolkit for developing speedy code that runs cross-architecture.

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has spent a lot of time in recent months while being employed by SiFive working on Picolibc as a new C library for embedded systems.

The sixth and final release candidate of PHP 7.4 is now available with it being on track for the general availability release before month's end.

Rust 1.39 is out today as the latest stable update for this popular programming language.

Facebook has released Zstd 1.4.4 today as the newest implementation of their increasingly used Zstanard compression algorithm.

While many fled from GitHub to GitLab following Microsoft acquiring the code hosting service, GitLab has come under a bit of fire of its own with plans they had been working on around telemetry support that would begin tracking its users and potentially sharing the data with third-party firms.

One of the interesting features for PHP 7.4 that is due for release at the end of next month is the long-awaited FFI (Foreign Function Interface) support. PHP 7.4's FFI lets developers call functions / variables / data structures defined in the C programming language from native PHP code.

The SYCL train continues rolling: besides this single-source high-level C++ target for OpenCL playing a big role at Intel with their forthcoming oneAPI and as part of that also working on SYCL LLVM support for upstream, new SYCL learning courses, and other industry adoption around this Khronos standard, Imagination Technologies is getting behind it in at least one way.

While SYCL has been around for five years as a Khronos standard providing a single-source C++ programming model for exploiting OpenCL, it has yet to reach its prime but demand for it is picking up with Intel working to upstream their SYCL back-end in LLVM, SYCL becoming part of their programming model with oneAPI and Xe Graphics, and other vendors also jumping on the SYCL bandwagon. Codeplay has now provided an open-source SYCL learning code for those interested in this higher-level alternative to straight OpenCL programming.

Python 3.8.0 is out today as the latest major release for this popular programming language.

PyPy 7.2 is out today as a big update for this alternative Python implementation that currently provides interpreters for compatibility with Python 2.7 and Python 3.6.

SHADERed is the open-source, cross-platform project for creating and testing HLSL/GLSL shaders. While a version number of 1.2.3 may not seem like a big update, some notable additions can be found within this new SHADERed release.

Version 1.4 has been released of POCL, the "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for a portable OpenCL implementation to be executed on CPUs as well as optionally targeting other accelerators via HSA or even CUDA devices.

WireGuard is still working on transitioning to the Linux kernel's existing crypto API as a faster approach to finally make it into the mainline kernel, but for those using the out-of-tree WireGuard secure VPN tunnel support, a new development release is available.

RenderDoc has already been the leading open-source graphics debugging tool for OpenGL / Vulkan / Direct3D across multiple platforms and it continues only getting more useful with each new feature release.

While popularity in Solaris-based operating systems may be on the decline, for Meson to ultimately replace other build systems it will need good support for said operating systems where Automake, CMake, and others are well supported. As such, with this weekend's Meson 0.52 release comes with better support for Solaris and the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos platforms.

Today marks the release of Rust 1.38 as the latest stable update for this increasingly popular, memory-safe programming language.

The Nim programming language now has a stability guarantee with this statically-typed, general purpose programming language hitting its 1.0 release.

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard -- who these days is focused full-time on RISC-V while working for SiFive -- has released Picolibc 1.0 as a new libc implementation for embedded systems.

SHADERed is a cross-platform utility designed for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This week marked the version 1.2 release of this Windows/Linux program for helping to test and evaluate shaders.

PHP 7.4-RC1 was released this week as this next annual update to the PHP programming implementation nears. Here is a look at how the PHP 7.4-RC1 performance looks like compared to the major releases going back to PHP 5.6.

Go 1.13 was released today as Google's latest update to their language and run-time/toolchain.

One month ago was the release of KernelShark 1.0 as the GUI for visualizing Ftrace Linux kernel traces. While v1.0 was a big step forward and switched from GTK to Qt, KernelShark 2.0 is already in planning with more features.

After already having gone through three alpha releases, PHP 7.4 has reached its feature freeze and branching. As a result, the first PHP 7.4 beta is now available that will follow by multiple betas and release candidates while hopefully being released by the end of November.

The GFX-RS high performance graphics API for the Rust programming language and based on Vulkan while mapping to Metal when on Apple systems is out with a new release.

The Rust language team is marking this US Independence Day by rolling out Rust 1.36.

The first alpha release of PHP 7.4 is now available ahead of its feature freeze next month and after a period of betas and release candidates will culminate with the official PHP 7.4.0 release around the end of November.

Git 2.22 was released today as the newest release of this highly popular distributed revision control system.