ZDNet reports: The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) C++ group, Working Group 21 (WG21), has agreed upon the finalized version of 'C++20', the first major update to the 35 year-old programming language since C++17 from 2017... The 2020 release of C++ is huge by historical standards. Herb Sutter, a Microsoft engineer and long-time chair of WG21 C++ ISO committee, said it "will be C++'s largest release since C++11", meaning it's bigger than any of the past three releases, which happen every three years. It's also the first version that has been standardized....

Two of the most important features coming to C++20 are "modules" and "coroutines". Modules, which was led by Google's Richard Smith, stands in for header files and helps isolate the effects of macros while supporting larger builds. As Sutter noted recently, C++20 marks the "first time in about 35 years that C++ has added a new feature where users can define a named encapsulation boundary...."

Coroutines represents a generalization of a function. "Regular functions always start at the beginning and exit at the end, whereas coroutines can also suspend the execution to be resumed later at the point where they were left off," C++ contributors explain in a proposal for coroutines.
"We expect it to be formally published toward the end of 2020," Sutter said said in an announcement.

Interestingly, the year C++ was first released in 1985, Microsoft used it to build Windows 1.0, ZDNet points out. "These days Microsoft is exploring Mozilla-developed Rust to replace legacy Windows code written in C and C++ because of Rust's memory safety qualities."

Apple adjusted its App Store review guidelines to loosen restrictions on iPhone and iPad games that stream directly from the internet and in-app purchase rules that have frustrated developers. From a report: The changes mean Apple will approve games that stream from the web, versus from content installed on a device, for the first time. That reverses a rule that frustrated companies including Microsoft. The new rules will still require games to be submitted individually. That means companies still won't be able to launch all-you-can-eat streaming game services on Apple's platform. However, these services can now offer a catalog that directs users to other streaming games from the same developer. But that catalog must point players to the App Store to download those other games individually. Apple is also no longer imposing its in-app purchase requirements on online teaching apps, such as tutoring or workout offerings.

As coronavirus news was increasingly trapped behind the Great Firewall, the programming platform became a refuge from censorship. It may not last long. From a report: When the coronavirus first spread through China in January, Chinese PhD student Weilei Zeng watched the pandemic unfold online from his apartment in Riverside, California. Thousands of miles from home, he frantically tried to keep up with news of the crisis, following the rare outpouring of discontent that flooded Chinese social media: lockdown diaries penned by anxious patients; video footage of overcrowded hospitals; tributes to Li Wenliang, the young doctor who was reprimanded for "rumor-mongering" when he first warned the public about the virus (and would die of Covid-19 only a month later). Then, inevitably, as Chinese censors stepped in to scrub the internet clean, Zeng would return to a link he'd visited just a few days earlier to find only the familiar 404 error message -- indicating that the page had vanished. Zeng soon discovered that these posts were not gone. Many had been preserved and quietly tucked away in an unexpected corner of the internet: GitHub, the world's largest open source software site. Founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub is popular among developers and programmers, who use the platform mostly to share and crowdsource code. Zeng often used it as a way to collaborate with his university peers on research projects. But after the pandemic hit, he stumbled on thousands of Chinese internet users repurposing GitHub as a Covid-19 archive, racing against censors to document the outbreak in the form of news articles, medical journals, and personal accounts.

One collaborative project, known as a "repository," was named #2020nCovMemory. Founded by seven volunteers from around the world, it included everything from investigative reports published by Chinese news magazine Caixin to the diary entries of Wuhan writer Fang Fang, who criticized the local government's suppression of information and initial failure to warn the public about the virus. Another repository, called Terminus2049 -- named after a planet in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series -- collected sensitive articles that were otherwise inaccessible behind China's Great Firewall, such as an interview with Ai Fen, the doctor who first discovered the virus in December. In February, Zeng joined a repository called 2020nCov_individual_archives, to crowdsource online diary entries and citizens' accounts of everyday life during the pandemic. "It made me feel much more at peace, knowing that these stories were being saved somewhere," Zeng says. On the Chinese internet, global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are banned, and domestic platforms like WeChat and Weibo are strictly monitored. But GitHub, known to some Chinese internet users as the "last land of free speech in China," remains accessible. Chinese authorities cannot censor individual projects, because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic.

Apple's "Sign In with Apple" login system will no longer work with Epic Games accounts as soon as September 11th, Epic said today. The new restriction is another casualty of Apple and Epic's ongoing spat. From a report: If you currently use "Sign In with Apple" for your Epic account, Epic says you'll need to update your account with new login credentials before September 11th to retain access. Epic has put together a guide on how to make that update if you need to do so. Epic also says that it may be able to recover your account manually after the "Sign in with Apple" option goes away, but you'll have to contact the studio directly. Apple requires developers to use its single sign-on system if they offer any other third-party options and want their apps in the App Store -- presumably a driving factor behind Epic offering the service as a sign-in factor in the first place.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On September 1st, 2010, Epic Games released its Citadel tech demo in the Apple App Store. It was a boring thing to actually play -- you simply walked around a medieval town in first-person perspective, taking in the sights with no objectives -- but this calm debut marked a big moment for iOS, the App Store, and Epic Games. It proved that developers could fit gigantic, richly detailed set pieces running on a smartphone and do it while utilizing Unreal Engine 3, the same engine that powered some of the most popular games in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of consoles. The devices of choice, if you wanted to get access to mobile games with impressive graphics, were suddenly just the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The Citadel demo didn't come to Android until almost two and a half years later in 2013.

The Citadel demo was groundbreaking at the time, and it possibly helped to kickstart the trend of bringing console-like experiences to the nascent mobile gaming platform. When I first saw it, I remember feeling like I immediately needed to throw my HTC Droid Eris out the window and buy an iPhone instead. I eventually got to try it out on an iPad at the gadget store where I was employed at the time, and it was stunning to see high-fidelity textures that had dimension and lighting that dynamically shifted when you walked into a building. There were even reflections at a certain point. I had played better-looking games on PC at that point, but something about the experience of being packed into a tiny device made for a magical proof of concept that left an impact on me, even as the fun of walking around Citadel lost its appeal. Ten years later, things are very different. Right now, Epic Games and Apple are in the midst of a high-profile legal battle that will likely have a serious impact on their relationship moving forward.

Higher ratings are the 'lifeblood' of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. "Enjoying Skype?" a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though, an entire industry has spent countless hours and lines of code to craft this moment. The prompt, seemingly random, can be orchestrated to hit your glowing screen only at times when you are most likely to leave a five star review. Gaming apps will solicit a rating just after you reach a high score. Banking apps will ask when they know it's payday. Gambling apps will prompt users after they are dealt the perfect Blackjack hand. A sporting app will give the nudge only when a user's team is winning.

Apple has for a decade clamped down on "ratings farms" and "download bots" that companies use to fraudulently garner five-star scores and manipulate App Store rankings. And it has had some success. But these are blunt instruments trying to cheat the system in clear violation of Apple's rules. The more sophisticated techniques stay within the rules but draw on behavioural psychology to understand your mood, emotions and behaviour -- they are not hacking the system; they are hacking your brain. "The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush," says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web. "They can target you when you are euphoric, when you have a lot of dopamine. They can use machine learning to determine [when] a user will be more inclined to leave positive reviews."

China's enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. From a report: China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch's website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14. Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch's visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents. At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch's registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.

Object-oriented programming "has been wildly successful. But was the success just a coincidence?" asks Stack Overflow's blog: Asking why so many widely-used languages are OOP might be mixing up cause and effect. Richard Feldman argues in his talk that it might just be coincidence. C++ was developed in the early 1980s by Bjarne Stroustrup, initially as a set of extensions to the C programming language. Building on C , C++ added object orientation but Feldman argues it became popular for the overall upgrade from C including type-safety and added support for automatic resource management, generic programming, and exception handling, among other features.

Then Java wanted to appeal to C++ programmers and doubled down on the OOP part. Ultimately, Sun Microsystems wanted to repeat the C++ trick by aiming for greatest familiarity for developers adopting Java. Millions of developers quickly moved to Java due to its exclusive integration in web browsers at the time. Seen this way, OOP seems to just be hitching a ride, rather than driving the success.
While acknowledging OOP cornerstones like encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, the article still takes a skeptical stance. "Seems like in 2020, there is not so much that OOP can do that other programming paradigms cannot, and a good programmer will use strategies from multiple paradigms together in the battle against complexity."

This week saw the release of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results: 2,049 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2020.

Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Inside.com's developer newsletter summarized some of the results: - The typical Rails developer is self-taught, has been working with Rails 4-7 years, and works remotely...

- Rails developers overwhelmingly choose lightweight solutions like jQuery over larger frameworks.

- Most of the developers surveyed feel Rails is still relevant, although they were split on whether or not the Rails core team is moving in the right direction, with 48% totally agreeing with that sentiment.
According to the results, 24% of survey respondents primarily developing on Linux, while 73% used Mac OS X (leaving just 3% using Windows or "Other"). Yet the most popular editor was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (used by 32% of respondents), followed by Vim-based editors (21%), Sublime (16%), RubyMine (15%), Atom (9%), Emacs (3%), and TextMate (2%).

The survey also asked the size of development teams for "your primary Rails application."

• A team of one - 17%
• Two to four - 35%
• Five to eight - 19%
• Eight to 15 - 13%
• 16 to 25 - 6%
• 25-50 - 5%
• 50-plus - 5%

Meanwhile, in a recent talk, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto confirmed that Ruby 3 will finally be released this Christmas, December 25, bringing a new pattern-matching syntax, right-hand-side variable assignment, and numbered block parameters.

He also promised improvements to help make Ruby more fast, more concurrent, and more correct. (Though "We don't pursue completeness nor soundness of the type systems, because, you know, Ruby is Ruby. Ruby is basically dynamically typed...")

On the 25th anniversary of Java, Oracle's director of developer content released a list of the 25 greatest Java apps ever written. This week they shared the responses it got.

"The U.S. National Security Agency was secretly pleased we noticed its Ghidra binary decompilation tool..." The tenor of conversation was both positive and polite. That speaks volumes about the excellent character of Java developers, don't you think? But, developers being who they are, opinions on what should have made the list abounded... Another Twitter commenter said I should have included Cassandra, the Spring Framework, Apache Spark, the Hazelcast open source in-memory data grid, and Apache Kafka....

- Reader Victor Duran suggested a Java app called Swish, which, he said, "made the entire Swedish economy go cashless." Swish handled 25 billion Swedish krona in May 2020; that's a little more than 2.8 billion US dollars. According to a company spokesperson, parts of the back end are written in Java.

- There are many Java games to choose from, of course, but I was called out for not including Runescape and Old School Runescape, two popular Java-based applications that entertain millions to this day...

- As a commenter pointed out, mobile apps for both WordPress and Telegram are written in Java — and Telegram's encrypted, self-destruct chat feature makes it one of the most popular apps in the world with more than 400 million active users....

- In the final category, several researchers at CERN pointed out that some Large Hadron Collider (LHC) software and other data analytics software are written in Java. That includes the LHC Logging Service, which captures and stores the LHC data. As you can see in this 2006 paper, the LHC Logging Service has been using Java for many years.

An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust.

Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar.

Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring.
* Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day."

The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..."

"Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

Dev & Gear created a long list of YouTube channels that offer technical videos to help you learn web development from scratch or just improve your skills. Some of the channels listed include: LearnCode.academy, Dev Ed, Traversy Media, Codecourse, and Wes Bos.

Is your favorite YouTube channel for web development and programming included on the list? If not, let us know what it is in a comment.

A U.S. appeals court rejected Oracle's challenges to the Pentagon's disputed $10 billion cloud-computing contract. From a report: Oracle had raised a number of issues, including allegations of conflicts of interest with Amazon.com, and claims the Pentagon violate its own rules when it set up the contract to be awarded to a single firm. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Oracle wasn't harmed by any errors the Pentagon made in developing the contract proposal because it wouldn't have qualified for the contract anyway. Oracle was fighting its exclusion from seeking the lucrative cloud-computing deal, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in October over market leader Amazon Web Services. The project, which is valued at as much as $10 billion over a decade, is designed to help the Pentagon consolidate its technology programs and quickly move information to warfighters around the world.

Apple on Monday announced that its new App Store appeals process, first revealed at WWDC in June, is now live, meaning developers can challenge Apple over whether their app is in fact violating one of its guidelines. In addition to that, Apple says developers can also suggest changes to the App Store guidelines through a form submission on its online developer portal. From a report "For apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues. You'll instead be able to address guideline violations in your next submission," reads a note posted to Apple's developer website. "And now, in addition to appealing decisions about whether an app violates guidelines, you can suggest changes to the guidelines." These changes were introduced at WWDC on the heels of a rather public feud with software maker Basecamp, the creator of a new email service called Hey. Basecamp openly challenged Apple over whether it could distribute an iOS companion app to its email service without including in-app sign-up options, as Hey costs $99 a year and Basecamp felt it unnecessary to give Apple its standard 30 percent cut of that revenue (although Apple does only take 15 percent of in-app subscription revenue after one year of service). Apple, in response, held up the company's bug fixes and update capability.

An anonymous reader quotes Psychology Today: While software development jobs sound great right out of the gate, technology roles don't always offer a great career path. The entry-level salary is fantastic, and the job is fun. But five years on, the average developer reaches a senior role, and there aren't many more rungs on the technology career ladder. An article from 1998 in the New York Times reported that six years after finishing college, only 57 percent of computer science graduates were working as programmers. After 20 years, the figure dropped to 19 percent. In contrast, the figures for civil engineering were 61 percent and 52 percent...

It's not just about the money — it's at least as much about the control you have over what you do. And software developers these days have little say in what apps they build. "More than anything, what bothered me is the feeling that my work doesn't matter one way or another," said one of my friends before he quit his programming job. He continued, "You get into software thinking you'll build cool things, but instead, it's about jumping through hoops for business school people with bad ideas."

Rapid changes in technology make programming one of the fastest-moving careers. Avoiding burnout is the only way to have a long and sustainable career in tech. Veteran software developers often recommend to:

- Work at a place where you can grow. Constantly learning new things is a requirement in tech, but it's only sustainable if you can do it as part of the job.

- Build transferable skills. Many developers find it interesting to invest in learning leadership skills and explore technical management roles — those don't change as often as programming languages do.

- Have creative outlets and create a space to focus on yourself, to switch off and relax. Make sure you move enough, eat well, and spend quality time with friends and family.

Of course, there's always the nuclear option: make your money and get out.

Phoronix reports: As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference...

To be clear though, these Rust Linux kernel plans do not involve rewriting large parts of the kernel in Rust (at least for the foreseeable future...), there would be caveats on the extent to which Rust code could be used and what functionality, and the Rust support would be optional when building the Linux kernel. C would remain the dominant language of the kernel and then it's just a matter of what new functionality gets added around Rust if concerned by memory safety, concurrency, and other areas where Rust is popular with developers. Various upstream developers have been interested in Rust for those language benefits around memory safety and security as well as its syntax being close to C. There would be a to-be-determined subset of Rust to be supported by the Linux kernel.... While the Rust code would be optional, the developers do acknowledge there are limitations on where Rust is supported due to the LLVM compiler back-ends. But at least for x86/x86_64, ARM/ARM64, POWER, and other prominent targets there is support along with the likes of RISC-V.

Nothing firm has been determined yet but it's a topic that is still being discussed at the virtual LPC this week and surely over the weeks/months ahead on the kernel mailing list. There is Rust-For-Linux on GitHub with a prototype kernel module implementation. There is also the PDF slides from Thursday's talk on the matter.
It's not clear to me that this is a done deal. But the article argues that "it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be..."

Friday night CNET reported: With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night.
Some reactions from Twitter:

- "The potential of #Neuralink is mind-boggling, but fuckkkk why would they use Bluetooth???"

- "they're using C/C++ too lmao"

But then videogame programming legend John Carmack responded: "Quality, reliable software can be delivered in any language, but language choice has an impact. For me, C would be a middle-of-the-road choice; better than a dynamic language like javascript or python, but not as good as a more modern strongly static typed languages.

However, the existence of far more analysis tools for C is not an insignificant advantage. If you really care about robustness, you are going to architect everything more like old Fortran, with no dynamic allocations at all, and the code is going to look very simple and straightforward.

So an interesting question: What are the aspects of C++ that are real wins for that style over C? Range checked arrays would be good. What else?
When asked "What's a better modern choice?" Carmack replied "Rust would be the obvious things, and I don't have any reason to doubt it would be good, but I haven't implemented even a medium sized application in it."

But then somewhere in the discussion, Elon Musk made a joke about C's lack of "class" data structures. Elon Musk responded: I like C, because it avoids class warfare
But then Musk also gave interesting responses to two more questions on Twitter: Which is your fav programming language? Python?

Elon Musk: Actually C, although the syntax could be improved esthetically

Could Neuralink simulate an alternate reality that could be entered at will, like Ready Player One? Implications for VR seem to be massive. Essentially, a simulation within a simulation if we're already in one ...

Elon Musk: Later versions of a larger device would have that potential

An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack: While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control: Istio has introduced a new Istio steering committee.

According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four "elected Community Seats" and nine "proportionally allocated Contribution Seats," a change they say "solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project." This final point is really the key to the announcement here, with them further and more explicitly clarifying later that "no single vendor, no matter how large their contribution, has majority voting control over the Istio project." To this end, they write, they have "implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee."

As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election. The nine Contribution Seats will be assigned to a minimum of three different companies "in proportion to contributions made to Istio in the previous 12 months," with this year's metric being merged pull requests.
But not everyone was satisfied. On Twitter AWS engineer Matthew S. Wilson called it "a crappy way to build a community," objecting to the way it's recognizing and rewarding open source contributions by company rather than by the individuals.

And Knative co-founder Matt Moore called it "what you get when a company wants to 'play community', but treat its employees as interchangeable cogs."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a swing at Apple on Thursday, calling the iPhone maker's app store monopolistic and harmful to customers during a company-wide meeting. From a report: "[Apple has] this unique stranglehold as a gatekeeper on what gets on phones," Zuckerberg said to more than 50,000 employees via webcast. He added that the Cupertino, California-based company's app store "blocks innovation, blocks competition" and "allows Apple to charge monopoly rents." While the Facebook CEO was specifically answering a question about Apple blocking gaming-related apps, his comments came at a time where authorities are scrutinizing both Silicon Valley giants for antitrust behavior. [...] Zuckerberg's comments were another signal that there's no love lost in the long-contentious relationship between the leader of the social network and the $2 trillion electronic device maker. "That's innovation that could really improve people's lives," Zuckerberg said on Thursday. "And Apple's just balking at it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A browser fingerprinting script is a piece of JavaScript code that runs inside a web page and works by testing for the presence of certain browser features. In an academic paper published earlier this month, a team of academics from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, Davis, has analyzed how popular browser fingerprinting scripts are used today by website operators. Using a machine learning toolkit they developed themselves and named FP-Inspector, the research team scanned and analyzed the top 100,000 most popular websites on the internet, according to the Alexa web traffic ranking.

"We find that browser fingerprinting is now present on more than 10% of the top-100K websites and over a quarter of the top-10K websites," the research team said. However, the research team also points out that despite the large number of websites that are currently using browser fingerprinting, not all scripts are used for tracking. Some fingerprinting scripts are also used for fraud detection since automated bots tend to have the same or similar fingerprints, and fingerprinting scripts are a reliable method of detecting automated behavior. Additional details about the team's research can be found in a paper named "Fingerprinting the Fingerprinters: Learning to Detect Browser Fingerprinting Behaviors," set to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, next year, in May 2021. If you're concerned about the findings, you can block fingerprinting scripts by enabling anti-fingerprinting protections in your respective browser settings or by installing an ad blocker extension.