For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

A Microsoft .NET Community standup has left Windows desktop developers wondering what kind of future, if any, the company has planned for its older desktop application frameworks, Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). From a report: A "what's new" slide for WPF presented by senior program manager Olia Gavrysh last week shows "Community Run Project" as the first bullet point, causing consternation among attendees. "Who's happy that WPF is now a community run project? This is soooo scary," remarked Morten Nielsen, a senior principal engineer at ESRI working on the ArcGIS runtime, for location-based analytics.

The slide was perhaps misinterpreted. It was intended as an update on what is happening with pull requests from the community, rather than meaing that WPF has been handed over to the community. Nevertheless, concerns about the future of the framework are well founded. "It's not dead. we have a team working on WPF and supporting it," said Gavrysh, but added, "we now switch to the model where we accept a lot of PRs [pull requests] from the community because we think of WPF as [a] very mature project so not that much rapid development is happening."

Stack Overflow has the announced the results of its annual survey of developers. ZDNet reports: Almost three-quarters (74%) of developers are actively looking for new roles or are open to fresh opportunities, according to research.... The highest percentage of active job seekers is in the 20-24 year-old cohort (27%), with 21% for 25-34 year-olds, 17% for 35-44 year-olds, and only 12% for 45-54 year-olds.

Additionally, the percentage of younger developers actively searching for their next role increased nine points year over year, according to the survey of 2,600 developers by StackOverflow....

Some 54% of respondents to the StackOverflow survey said a better salary is the largest motivator when considering a new opportunity. The biggest factors that stop developers from looking for new jobs are flexibility (58%), salary (54%), and learning opportunities (54%). Developers also want flexibility and the option to work from home, with 46% citing starting/ending the day at a precise time or being expected to work from an office (44%) as the top drawbacks in their current roles.

"Regardless of the economy, it's clear salary is important but it's not everything," says StackOverflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar.

TechCrunch reports: Every developer knows that it's a bad idea to hardcode security credentials into source code. Yet it happens and when it does, the consequences can be dire. Until now, GitHub only made its secret scanning service available to paying enterprise users who paid for GitHub Advanced Security, but starting Thursday, the Microsoft-owned company is making its secrets scanning service available for all public GitHub repos for free.

In 2022 alone, the company notified partners in its secret scanning partner program of more than 1.7 million potential secrets that were exposed in public repositories. The service scans repositories for over 200 known token formats and then alerts partners of potential leaks — and you can define your own regex patterns, too.... However, the rollout of the service will be gradual and it will not be available to all users until the end of January 2023.
TechCrunch also notes there's alternatives (including open source GitLeaks).

In June GitHub announced they'd retire their customizable text editor Atom on December 15th — so they could focus their development efforts on the IDEs Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces. "As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly," according to a post on GitHub's blog.

So while "GitHub and our community have benefited tremendously from those who have filed issues, created extensions, fixed bugs, and built new features on Atom," this now means that:

- Atom package management will stop working
- No more security updates
- Teletype will no longer work
- Deprecated redirects that supported downloading Electron symbols and headers will no longer work
- Pre-built Atom binaries can continue to be downloaded from the atom repository releases

Fortunately, in 2014 GitHub open sourced the code for Atom. And according to It's FOSS News: A community build for it is already available; however, there seems to be a new version (Pulsar) that aims to bring feature parity with the original Atom and introduce modern features and updated architecture....

The reason why they made a separate fork is because of different goals for the projects. Pulsar wants to modernize everything to present a successor to Atom. Of course, the user interface is much of the same. Considering Pulsar hasn't had a stable release yet, the branding could sometimes seem all over the place. However, the essentials seem to be there with the documentation, packages, and features like the ability to install packages from Git repositories....

As of now, it is too soon to say if Pulsar will become something better than what the Atom community version offers. However, it is something that we can keep an eye on.... You can head to its official download page to get the package required for your system and test it out.
Like Atom, Pulsar is cross-platform support (supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows).

IBM has quietly announced it's planning a 24-core Power 10 processor, seemingly to make one of its servers capable of running Oracle's database in a cost-effective fashion. From a report: A hardware announcement dated December 13 revealed the chip in the following "statement of general direction" about Big Blue's Power S1014 technology-based server: "IBM intends to announce a high-density 24-core processor for the IBM Power S1014 system (MTM 9105-41B) to address application environments utilizing an Oracle Database with the Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licensing model. It intends to combine a robust compute throughput with the superior reliability and availability features of the IBM Power platform while complying with Oracle Database SE2 licensing guidelines."

Apple is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024. From a report: Software engineering and services employees are engaged in a major push to open up key elements of Apple's platforms, according to people familiar with the efforts. As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company's App Store, sidestepping Apple's restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments. The moves -- a reversal of long-held policies -- are a response to EU laws aimed at leveling the playing field for third-party developers and improving the digital lives of consumers. For years, regulators and software makers have complained that Apple and Google, which run the two biggest mobile app stores, wield too much power as gatekeepers.

"Java is no longer among the top three most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Index," reports the Register, "one of several not particularly definitive yardsticks by which such things are measured." According to Paul Jansen, CEO of Netherlands-based TIOBE Software, the rising popularity of C++ has pushed Java down a notch. The index's rankings are now:

- Python in first place
- C second
- C++ third, and
- Java fourth.

C++ stepped up to third, and Java fell to fourth. "C++ surpassed Java for the first time in the history of the TIOBE Index, which means that Java is at position 4 now," said Jansen in the December update for the TIOBE Index. "This is the first time that Java is not part of the top 3 since the beginning of the TIOBE Index in 2001."

The surge in C++, perhaps in part helped by the stable release of C++ 20 in December 2020, is particularly ironic in light of the language's recent dismissal by Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich, which coincides with industry evangelism for Rust and its capacity for memory safety.
The article points out that other rankings still show a slighty higher popularity for Java. And ZDNet notes the other languages rising quickly in popularity over the last 12 months: In a year-on-year comparison in Tiobe's index, the languages now in the top 20 that made significant gains over the period are: Rust (up from 27 to 20), Objective-C (up from 29 to 19), science-specialized MATLAB (20 to 14), and Google's Go language (up from 19 to 12).

"Linus has released the 6.1 kernel," reports LWN.net — and it's the one with initial support for kernel development in Rust.

Elsewhere LWN explains the specifics of this milestone: No system with a production 6.1 kernel will be running any Rust code, but this change does give kernel developers a chance to play with the language in the kernel context and get a sense for how Rust development feels....

There are other initiatives underway, including the writing of an Apple graphics driver in the Rust language. For the initial merge into the mainline kernel, though, Linus Torvalds made it clear that as little functionality as possible should be included. So those drivers and their support code were trimmed out and must wait for a future kernel release. What is there is the support needed to build a module that can be loaded into the kernel, along with a small sample module.... Torvalds asked for something that could do "hello world" and that is what we got. It is something that can be played with, but it cannot be used for any sort of real kernel programming at this point.

That situation will, hopefully, change in the near future.
Meanwhile, Linux 6.1 also includes "support for destructive BPF programs, some significant io_uring performance improvements, better user-space control over transparent huge-page creation, improved memory-tiering support."

The Register adds: Other interesting additions include more support for the made-in-China LoongArch CPU architecture, introductory work to support Wi-Fi 7 and security fixes for some flaky Wi-Fi routines in previous versions of the kernel. There's also plenty of effort to improve the performance of Linux on laptops, and enhanced power efficiency for AMD's PC-centric RYZEN silicon.

"When the third major release of the Dart programming language debuts in mid-2023, null values will no longer be allowed where they're not expected," reports the Register: Null in this context is an assignment value indicating the absence of a value or referenced object.... Dart, an object-oriented, garbage-collected C-like language that once aspired to replace JavaScript, supported sound null safety — a way to prevent errors from accessing variables set to null — as of version 2.12. But it maintained modes for running code without null safety or with partial null safety. Dart 3 will no longer entertain those suboptimal possibilities.

"Our next release, Dart 3, completes the journey to a fully sound null safe language," explained Michael Thomsen, product manager on Dart and Flutter, in a blog post. "As the last step of that journey, we're removing several historical Dart language and SDK artifacts, including removing support for running without sound null safety." Sound null safety, Thomsen explains, means that a non-nullable variable never contains a null value. Not every implementation of null safety is so certain: TypeScript, for example, is unsound — you can assign a null value to a non-null variable. C# has exceptions to its null checks. And Kotlin also has exceptions.

Dart's transition will help catch type-related bugs at compile time, and should improve code readability, maintainability, and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation. There's a cost however. Sound null safety will be the only option so pubspec files — Dart package metadata — with an SDK constraint set for less than 2.12 will no longer resolve in Dart 3. According to Thomsen, about 85 percent of Flutter code (which is written in Dart) supports sound null safety at this point. Those with apps and packages in the remaining 15 percent are urged to adapt their code prior to Dart 3's arrival....

Following the release of Dart 3, the next significant milestone for the language is likely to be support for compiling Dart code into WebAssembly (Wasm), which will allow Flutter Web apps to run as native code in browsers.

DeepMind's new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to "achieve approximately human-level performance" in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: AlphaCode's creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of code from GitHub, just to familiarize it with coding syntax and conventions. Then, they trained it to translate problem descriptions into code, using thousands of problems collected from programming competitions. For example, a problem might ask for a program to determine the number of binary strings (sequences of zeroes and ones) of length n that don't have any consecutive zeroes. When presented with a fresh problem, AlphaCode generates candidate code solutions (in Python or C++) and filters out the bad ones. But whereas researchers had previously used models like Codex to generate tens or hundreds of candidates, DeepMind had AlphaCode generate up to more than 1 million.

To filter them, AlphaCode first keeps only the 1% of programs that pass test cases that accompany problems. To further narrow the field, it clusters the keepers based on the similarity of their outputs to made-up inputs. Then, it submits programs from each cluster, one by one, starting with the largest cluster, until it alights on a successful one or reaches 10 submissions (about the maximum that humans submit in the competitions). Submitting from different clusters allows it to test a wide range of programming tactics. That's the most innovative step in AlphaCode's process, says Kevin Ellis, a computer scientist at Cornell University who works AI coding.

After training, AlphaCode solved about 34% of assigned problems, DeepMind reports this week in Science. (On similar benchmarks, Codex achieved single-digit-percentage success.) To further test its prowess, DeepMind entered AlphaCode into online coding competitions. In contests with at least 5000 participants, the system outperformed 45.7% of programmers. The researchers also compared its programs with those in its training database and found it did not duplicate large sections of code or logic. It generated something new -- a creativity that surprised Ellis. The study notes the long-term risk of software that recursively improves itself. Some experts say such self-improvement could lead to a superintelligent AI that takes over the world. Although that scenario may seem remote, researchers still want the field of AI coding to institute guardrails, built-in checks and balances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple is loosening its requirements around how developers have to price their apps as legal and regulatory pressure over its tight control of the App Store intensifies. The company announced today it's expanding its App Store pricing system to offer developers access to 700 additional price points, bringing the new total number of price points available to 900. It will also allow U.S. developers to set prices for apps, in-app purchases or subscriptions as low as $0.29 or as high as $10,000, and in rounded endings (like $1.00) instead of just $0.99. Similar new policies to reduce restrictions around price points will roll out in global markets, alongside new tools aimed at helping developers better manage pricing outside their local market. The changes will initially become available starting today, Dec. 6, 2022, for auto-renewable subscriptions. They'll become available to paid apps and in-app purchases in Spring 2023.

U.S. consumers may have noticed some App Store prices already ended in other digits besides just $0.99. But that's because auto-renewing subscriptions had access to a slightly wider range of price points than other consumables -- including the ability to set their prices as low as $0.49. But these same rules did not apply to non-subscription app pricing, which added to consumer and developer confusion. The new system is looking to simplify the pricing so it's more consistent across the board. For U.S. apps in the lowest tiers, price points can increase in $0.10 increments up to $10.00 going forward. These price steps become less granular when you move into higher price points. For example, between $10 and $50, they then can increase by $0.50 increments. Between $50 and $200, the price steps would be $1.00, and so on.

In addition to the updated pricing policies, Apple is also now rolling out tools to help developers better manage currency and taxes across storefronts. Starting today, developers will be able to set their subscription prices in their local currency as the basis for automatically generating pricing across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies, or they can choose to manually set prices in each market. When pricing is set automatically, pricing outside a developer's home market will update as foreign exchange and tax rates change. This functionality will expand to all other apps beyond subscription apps in Spring 2023. Also coming in 2023, developers with paid apps and in-app purchases will be able to choose to set local territory pricing, which isn't impacted by automatic price adjustments based on the changes in taxes and foreign exchange rates. And all developers will also be able to define the availability of in-app purchases by storefront.

"The Perl Advent Calendar has come a long way since it's first year in 2000," says an announcement on Reddit. But in fact the online world now has many daily advent calendars aimed at programmers — offering tips about their favorite language or coding challenges.

• The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — decided to try publishing 24 original articles for their 2022 HTMHell Advent Calendar. Elsewhere on the way there's the Web Performance Calendar, promising daily articles for speed geeks. And the 24 Days in December blog comes to life every year with new blog posts for PHP users.

• The JVM Advent Calendar brings a new article daily about a JVM-related topic. And there's also a C# Advent calendar promising two new blog posts about C# every day up to (and including) December 25th.

• The Perl Advent Calendar offers fun stories about Perl tools averting December catastrophes up at the North Pole. (Day One's story — "Silent Mite" — described Santa's troubles building software for a ninja robot alien toy, since its embedded hardware support contract prohibited unwarrantied third-party code, requiring a full code rewrite using Perl's standard library.) Other stories so far this December include "Santa is on GitHub" and "northpole.cgi"

• The code quality/security software company SonarSource has a new 2022 edition of their Code Security Advent Calendar — their seventh consecutive year — promising "daily challenges until December 24th. Get ready to fill your bag of security tricks!" (According to a blog post the challenges are being announced on Twitter and on Mastadon.

• Just as the Perl community spawned another language named Perl 6 — now called Raku — there's also a Raku-themed advent calendar. (It's now at a new URL, though it's been running since 2009.) Day Three's post tells the story of Santa and the Rakupod Wranglers.

• "24 Pull Requests" dares participants to make 24 pull requests before December 24th. (The site's tagline is "giving back to open source for the holidays.") Over the years tens of thousands of developers (and organizations) have participated — and this year they're also encouraging organizers to hold hack events.

• The Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites promise 24 puzzles delivered by email (though you'll have to pay if you also want them to email you the solutions!)

• TryHackMe.com has its own set of darily cybersecurity puzzles (and even a few prizes).

• For 2022 Oslo-based Bekk Consulting (a "strategic internet consulting company") is offering an advent calendar of their own. A blog post says its their sixth annual edition, and promises "new original articles, podcasts, tutorials, listicles and videos every day up until Christmas Eve... all written and produced by us - developers, designers, project managers, agile coaches, management consultants, specialists and generalists."

Whether you participate or not, the creation of programming-themed advent calendar sites is a long-standing tradition among geeks, dating back more than two decades. (Last year Smashing magazine tried to compile an exhaustive list of the various sites serving all the different developer communities.)

But no list would be complete without mentioning Advent of Code. This year's programming puzzles involve everything from feeding Santa's reindeer and loading Santa's sleigh. The site's About page describes it as "an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

Now in its eighth year, the site's daily two-part programmig puzzles have a massive online following. This year's Day One puzzle was solved by 178,628 participants...

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Since 1999 fiction writers have tried starting and finishing the composition of 50,000-word novels in November for "National Novel Writing Month". But for the last nine years, programmers have instead tried generating 50,000 word novels — and this year's edition received more than 50 entries.

"The only rule is that you share at least one novel and also your source code at the end," explains the event's official page on GitHub.
From the repository's README file: The "novel" is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word "meow" (and yes it's been done!). It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg. It doesn't matter, as long as it's 50k+ words.

Please try to respect copyright. We're not going to police it, as ultimately it's on your head if you want to just copy/paste a Stephen King novel or whatever, but the most useful/interesting implementations are going to be ones that don't engender lawsuits.
This year's computer-generated novels include " sunday in the sunday in the," mapping the colors from each dot in the Pointillist painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte onto words from the lyrics of a musical about that painting. ("Rush blind. Link adds shallot again....")

"Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast," Matt Welsh, co-founder and chief executive of Fixie.ai and former Google engineering director, writes in a blog post. From the post: I hesitated writing this post, because I don't want to start, or get into, a holy war over programming languages. (Just to get the flame bait out of the way, Visual Basic is the best language ever!) But I've had a number of people ask me about my experience with Rust and whether they should pick up Rust for their projects. So, I'd like to share some of the pros and cons that I see of using Rust in a startup setting, where moving fast and scaling teams is really important. Right up front, I should say that Rust is very good at what it's designed to do, and if your project needs the specific benefits of Rust (a systems language with high performance, super strong typing, no need for garbage collection, etc.) then Rust is a great choice. But I think that Rust is often used in situations where it's not a great fit, and teams pay the price of Rust's complexity and overhead without getting much benefit.

My primary experience from Rust comes from working with it for a little more than 2 years at a previous startup. This project was a cloud-based SaaS product that is, more-or-less, a conventional CRUD app: it is a set of microservices that provide a REST and gRPC API endpoint in front of a database, as well as some other back-end microservices (themselves implemented in a combination of Rust and Python). Rust was used primarily because a couple of the founders of the company were Rust experts. Over time, we grew the team considerably (increasing the engineering headcount by nearly 10x), and the size and complexity of the codebase grew considerably as well. As the team and codebase grew, I felt that, over time, we were paying an increasingly heavy tax for continuing to use Rust. Development was sometimes sluggish, launching new features took longer than I would have expected, and the team was feeling a real productivity hit from that early decision to use Rust. Rewriting the code in another language would have, in the long run, made development much more nimble and sped up delivery time, but finding the time for the major rewrite work would have been exceedingly difficult.

So we were kind of stuck with Rust unless we decided to bite the bullet and rewrite a large amount of the code. Rust is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread, so why was it not working so well for us? [...] Despite being some of the smartest and most experienced developers I had worked with, many people on the team (myself included) struggled to understand the canonical ways to do certain things in Rust, how to grok the often arcane error messages from the compiler, or how to understand how key libraries worked (more on this below). We started having weekly "learn Rust" sessions for the team to help share knowledge and expertise. This was all a significant drain on the team's productivity and morale as everyone felt the slow rate of development. As a comparison point of what it looks like to adopt a new language on a software team, one of my teams at Google was one of the first to switch entirely from C++ to Go, and it took no more than about two weeks before the entire 15-odd-person team was quite comfortably coding in Go for the first time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Bohemia Interactive, the Czech Republic based developer of the military simulator game Arma 3, has published a blog and a video it hopes will help it with a unique problem. Footage from the video game known for its realism has gone viral several times since the game's release in 2013 as people have tried to pass off clips of the military simulation as footage of real war. This happens a lot, so often that there are multiple debunking stories on Reuters and the Associated Press specifically about debunking viral clips of war footage. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the problem has gotten much worse. The invasion is the largest ground war in Europe in a generation and people around the world gobble up every scrap of information they can. Pranksters and fraudsters have taken to uploading clips from Arma 3 to capitalize on that need for information.

Arma 3 is a hyper realistic military simulation and sandbox. It's meant to be a realistic modeling of real world conflict. It's even teamed up with the International Committee of the Red Cross to release DLC that details the after effects of armed conflict. A sister studio, Bohemia Interactive Simulations, broke from the company in 2013 and makes simulations for the Pentagon using similar technology. The game is also a sandbox with a vibrant modding scene (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds began its life as an Arma 3 mod) that allows players to customize the game however they want. That devotion to realism and open platform has made Arma 3 the perfect platform to use to create fake war footage. "While it's flattering that Arma 3 simulates modern war conflicts in such a realistic way, we are certainly not pleased that it can be mistaken for real-life combat footage and used as war propaganda," Pavel Krizka, PR Manager of Bohemia Interactive, said in a November 28 press release. "It has happened in the past (Arma 3 videos allegedly depicted conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, and even between India and Pakistan), but nowadays this content has gained traction in regard to the current conflict in Ukraine."

The life cycle is almost always the same. An Arma 3 nerd uploads something to YouTube and other people pull the video, edit it to make it look more realistic, then pass it off as actual footage of the conflict. The footage goes viral then the fact-checkers come in and tell everyone it's a video game. Bohemia Interactive issues a statement and then everyone waits for the next fake to come along. "We've been trying to fight against such content by flagging these videos to platform providers (FB, YT, TW, IG etc.), but it's very ineffective," Krizka said in the press release. "With every video taken down, ten more are uploaded each day. We found the best way to tackle this is to actively cooperate with leading media outlets and fact-checkers (such as AFP, Reuters, and others), who have better reach and the capacity to fight the spreading of fake news footage effectively." Some of the tells of fake footage include a low resolution, a shaky camera, and/or a night setting. "They're often without sound, don't feature people in motion, and sometimes still include the HUD elements from the video game," adds Motherboard. "There's typically unnatural particle effects, unrealistic vehicles, uniforms, and equipment."

"We have seen many Arma players pointing out mistakenly identified footage, which helps viewers understand what they're seeing," said Bohemia Interactive. "Thank you for helping!"

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: A new book identifies "26 Lines of Code That Changed the World." But its cheeky title also incorporates a comment from Unix's source code — "You are Not Expected to Understand This". From a new interview with the book's editor:

With chapter titles like "Wear this code, go to jail" and "the code that launched a million cat videos," each chapter offers appreciations for programmers, gathering up stories about not just their famous lives but their sometimes infamous works. (In Chapter 10 — "The Accidental Felon" — journalist Katie Hafner reveals whatever happened to that Harvard undergraduate who went on to inadvertently create one of the first malware programs in 1988...) The book quickly jumps from milestones like the Jacquard Loom and the invention of COBOL to bitcoin and our thought-provoking present, acknowledging both the code that guided the Apollo 11 moon landing and the code behind the 1962 videogame Spacewar. The Smithsonian Institution's director for their Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation writes in Chapter 4 that the game "symbolized a shift from computing being in the hands of priest-like technicians operating massive computers to enthusiasts programming and hacking, sometimes for the sheer joy of it."

I contributed chapter 9, about a 1975 comment in some Unix code that became "an accidental icon" commemorating a "momentary glow of humanity in a world of unforgiving logic." This chapter provided the book with its title. (And I'm also responsible for the book's index entry for "Linux, expletives in source code of".) In a preface, the book's editor describes the book's 29 different authors as "technologists, historians, journalists, academics, and sometimes the coders themselves," explaining "how code works — or how, sometimes, it doesn't work — owing in no small way to the people behind it."

"I've been really interested over the past several years to watch the power of the tech activists and tech labor movements," the editor says in this interview. "I think they've shown really immense power to effect change, and power to say, 'I'm not going to work on something that doesn't align with what I want for the future.' That's really something to admire.

"But of course, people are up against really big forces...."

Linux 6.1 (released last month) included what Linus Torvalds described as "initial Rust scaffolding," remembers this update from SD Times But now, "work has already been done since the 6.1 release to add more infrastructure for Rust in the kernel, though still none of the code interacts with any C code."

And there's still no actual Rust code in Linux: "You need to get all those things that can make sure that Rust can compile, and you can do the debugging and all these things," explained Joel Marcey, director of advocacy and operations for the Rust Foundation, "and make sure that the memory safety is there and all that sort of stuff. And that has to happen first before you can actually write any real code in Rust for the Linux kernel itself."

Marcey explained that Linux is going to be doing this inclusion very piecemeal, with lots of little integrations here and there over time so they can see how it is working. "I would imagine that over the next year, you're going to see more small incremental changes to the kernel with Rust, but as people are seeing that it's actually kind of working out, you'll be able to maybe, for example, write Linux drivers or whatever with Rust," said Marcey....

According to Bec Rumbul, executive director of the Rust Foundation, Rust being added to the kernel is an "enormous vote of confidence in the Rust programming language." She explained that in the past other languages have been planned to make it into the kernel and ended up not getting put in. "I think having someone with the kind of intellectual gravity of Linus Torvalds saying 'No, it's going in there,' that kind of says an awful lot about how reliable Rust already is and how much potential there is for the future as well," she said.

Rumbul believes that there will be an increased interest in the language, which is still relatively new (It first made its debut in 2010) compared to some of the other languages out there to choose from. "I suspect that because Rust is now in the kernel, and it's just being talked about much ... more widely, that it will seem like an attractive prospect to a lot of people that are looking to develop their skills and their knowledge," she said. Rumbul hopes people will also be inspired to participate in the language as contributors and maintainers, because those are some of the less popular roles within open source, but are extremely critical to the health of a language, she explained.
The Rust Foundation also launched a new security team in September to ensure best practices (including a dedicated security engineer). Their first initiative will be a security audit and threat modeling exercises. "We want to basically shore up," Rust operations director Marcey tells SD Times, "to ensure that Rust itself is actually as secure as we always say it is."

In this year's Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 86.73% of developers said they love Rust.

Google is working on a secretive project that uses machine learning to train code to write, fix, and update itself. From a report: This project is part of a broader push by Google into so-called generative artificial intelligence, which uses algorithms to create images, videos, code, and more. It could have profound implications for the company's future and developers who write code. The project, which began life inside Alphabet's X research unit and was codenamed Pitchfork, moved into Google's Labs group this summer, according to people familiar with the matter. By moving into Google, it signaled its increased importance to leaders. Google Labs pursues long-term bets, including projects in virtual and augmented reality.

Pitchfork is now part of a new group at Labs named the AI Developer Assistance team run by Olivia Hatalsky, a long-term X employee who worked on Google Glass and several other moonshot projects. Hatalsky, who ran Pitchfork at X, moved to Labs when it migrated this past summer. Pitchfork was built for "teaching code to write and rewrite itself," according to internal materials seen by Insider. The tool is designed to learn programming styles and write new code based on those learnings, according to people familiar with it and patents reviewed by Insider. "The team is working closely with the Research team," a Google representative said. "They're working together to explore different use cases to help developers."

Kite, a start-up that has been developing artificial intelligence technology to help developers write code for nearly a decade, is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code. Silicon Republic reports: Based in San Francisco, Kite was founded in 2014 as an early pioneer in the emerging field of AI that assists software developers in writing code -- an 'autocomplete' for programming of sorts. But now, after eight years of pursuing its vision to be a leader in AI-assisted programming, founder Adam Smith announced on the company website that the business is now wrapping up. According to him, even state-of-the-art machine learning models today don't understand the structure of code -- and too few developers are willing to pay for available services. "We failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10-plus years too early to market, ie, the tech is not ready yet," Smith explained. "You can see this in GitHub Copilot, which is built by GitHub in collaboration with OpenAI. As of late 2022, Copilot shows a lot of promise but still has a long way to go."

Copilot was first revealed in June 2021 as an AI assistant for programmers that essentially does for coding what predictive text does for writing emails. Developed in collaboration with OpenAI, GitHub had kept Copilot in technical preview until this summer, during which time it had been used by more than 1.2m developers. The AI was made available to all developers in June, at a cost of $10 a month or $100 a year. However, Smith said that the inadequacy of machine learning models in understanding the structure of code, such as non-local context, has been an insurmountable challenge for the Kite team. "We made some progress towards better models for code, but the problem is very engineering intensive. It may cost over $100m to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet."

While the business could have still been successful without necessarily increasing developer productivity by 10 times using AI, Smith said he thinks that Kite's delay and unsuccessful attempt at monetizing the service prevented the start-up from taking flight. "We sequenced building our business in the following order: First we built our team, then the product, then distribution and then monetization," he explained, adding that Kite did not reach product-market fit until 2019, five years after starting the company. Despite the time taken to get to the market, Smith said Kite was able to capture 500,000 monthly active developers using its AI with "almost zero marketing spend." But the product failed to generate revenue because the developers refused to pay for it. Smith says most of their code has been open sourced on GitHub, including their "data-driven Python type inference engine, Python public-package analyzer, desktop software, editor integrations, GitHub crawler and analyzer, and more more."