InfoQ Homepage System Programming Content on InfoQ
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ZetZ is a Formally Verified Dialect of C
ZetZ, or ZZ for short, is a Rust-inspired C dialect that is able to formally verify your code by executing it symbolically at compile time in a virtual machine. InfoQ has spoken with ZZ creator and maintainer Avid Picciani.
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Developer Surveys Survey: Including a Spotlight on Java Results
JRebel and Snyk have recently published their Java/JVM technology reports, and Codingame and Tiobe have published reports into language usage and adoption. InfoQ looks at the state of play of these reports, and what is happening in the Java and wider ecosystems today.
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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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IBM Stops Work on Swift — Q&A with Chris Bailey
IBM has recently discontinued its involvement in Server-side Swift development, which started soon after Swift was open-sourced, and relinquished its leadership in the Swift Server Work Group [SSWG]. InfoQ has talked to IBM's Chris Bailey to learn more about what this may imply for Swift and the Swift community.
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Swift 6 Will Bring Improved Concurrency Support and Memory Ownership
Swift development lead Ted Kremenek has announced a preliminary vision of what Swift 6 could include and how the community will get there on Swift's mailing list. Swift 6 will bring significant improvements to the language, including better concurrency support and memory ownership. No fixed timeline has been set yet, though, leading people to think it will not happen in 2020.
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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.