Julia 1.0 was released in 2018 — after a six-year wait.

And there's now another update. LWN.net gets you up to speed, calling Julia "a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing." Some of Julia's unusual features:

- Lisp-inspired metaprogramming
- The ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a "reactive notebook"
- An advanced type and dispatch system
- A sophisticated, built-in package manager.

Version 1.10 brings big increases in speed and developer convenience, especially improvements in code precompilation and loading times. It also features a new parser written in Julia... [I]t is faster, it produces more useful syntax-error messages, and it provides better source-code mapping, which associates locations in compiled code to their corresponding lines in the source. That last improvement also leads to better error messages and makes it possible to write more sophisticated debuggers and linters...

Between the improvements in precompilation and loading times, and the progress in making small binaries, two major and perennial complaints, of beginners and seasoned Julia users alike, have been addressed... StaticCompiler and related WebAssembly tools will make it easier to write web applications in Julia for direct execution in the browser; it is already possible, but may become more convenient over the next few years.
Thanks for sharing the article to long-time Slashdot reader lee1 — who also wrote No Starch Press's Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds .

lee1 also reminds us that Gnuplot 6.0 was released in December: lee1 writes: This article surveys the new features, including filled contours in 3D, adaptive plotting resolution, watchpoints, clipping of surfaces, pie charts, and new syntax for conditionals.

Stack Overflow's blog reports on a new programming language called Mariposa.

They call it a "toy" programming language, "created as a way to play around with a novel or odd feature, like variable assignment outside of the normal order of execution — more colloquially, time travel." Computer science has long sought to reason about time in electronic systems, thanks to a consistent interest in concurrency and real-time messaging... Mariposa allows you to manipulate the order of execution by assigning an instant to a variable, then setting the context of that instance. Here's a basic example, taken from the Mariposa readme:

x = 1
t = now()
print(x)
at t:
x = 2

According to the normal order of operations, this code should print "1". But because t is assigned to the instance in the second line, any modifications specified within an at t: block are applied immediately, and this code prints "2"...

While Mariposa caught a fair amount of attention recently, it's not the first implementation of time travel in programming. There is a Haskell package appropriately called tardis, which creates two state transformers: one travels forward in time and one backward. As the docs explain, "The most concise way to explain it is this: getPast retrieves the value from the latest sendFuture, while getFuture retrieves the value from the next sendPast." One function's past is another one's future.
The article explores "the history and future of other programming paradigms" applying logic to time, including interval temporal logic systems as well as "modeling, analysis, and verification languages/tools that allow temporal and state modeling without requiring temporal logic understanding."

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent. The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine. "Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?" SquidKid47 pondered. The Reddit post sparked an investigation from a fourth-year student named River Stanley, who was writing for a university publication called MathNEWS. [...]

MathNEWS' investigation tracked down responses from companies responsible for smart vending machines on the University of Waterloo's campus. Adaria Vending Services told MathNEWS that "what's most important to understand is that the machines do not take or store any photos or images, and an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface -- never taking or storing images of customers." According to Adaria and Invenda, students shouldn't worry about data privacy because the vending machines are "fully compliant" with the world's toughest data privacy law, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). "These machines are fully GDPR compliant and are in use in many facilities across North America," Adaria's statement said. "At the University of Waterloo, Adaria manages last mile fulfillment services -- we handle restocking and logistics for the snack vending machines. Adaria does not collect any data about its users and does not have any access to identify users of these M&M vending machines." [...]

But University of Waterloo students like Stanley now question Invenda's "commitment to transparency" in North American markets, especially since the company is seemingly openly violating Canadian privacy law, Stanley told CTV News. On Reddit, while some students joked that SquidKid47's face "crashed" the machine, others asked if "any pre-law students wanna start up a class-action lawsuit?" One commenter summed up students' frustration by typing in all caps, "I HATE THESE MACHINES! I HATE THESE MACHINES! I HATE THESE MACHINES!"

Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers, but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments. From a report: Nearly a dozen engineers, hiring managers, and entrepreneurs who spoke with WIRED describe an environment in which technical job applicants are being put through the wringer. Take-home coding tests used to be rare, deployed only if an employer needed to be further convinced. Now interviewees are regularly given projects described as requiring just two to three hours that instead take days of work.

Live-coding exercises are also more intense, industry insiders say. One job seeker described an experience where an engineering manager said during an interview, "OK, we're going to build a To Do List app right now," a process that might normally take weeks.

Emails reviewed by WIRED showed that in one interview for an engineering role at Netflix, a technical recruiter requested that a job candidate submit a three-page project evaluation within 48 hours -- all before the first round of interviews. A Netflix spokesperson said the process is different for each role and otherwise declined to comment. A similar email at Snap outlined a six-part interview process for a potential engineering candidate, with each part lasting an hour. A company spokesperson says its interview process hasn't changed as a result of labor market changes.

Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Famed naturalist Charles Darwin amassed an impressive personal library over the course of his life, much of which was preserved and cataloged upon his death in 1882. But many other items were lost, including more ephemeral items like unbound volumes, pamphlets, journals, clippings, and so forth, often only vaguely referenced in Darwin's own records. For the last 18 years, the Darwin Online project has painstakingly scoured all manner of archival records to reassemble a complete catalog of Darwin's personal library virtually. The project released its complete 300-page online catalog -- consisting of 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes, with links to electronic copies of the works -- to mark Darwin's 215th birthday on February 12.

"This unprecedentedly detailed view of Darwin's complete library allows one to appreciate more than ever that he was not an isolated figure working alone but an expert of his time building on the sophisticated science and studies and other knowledge of thousands of people," project leader John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore said. "Indeed, the size and range of works in the library makes manifest the extraordinary extent of Darwin's research into the work of others."

An anonymous reader shared this post from Phoronix: With Linux 6.8 the kernel's Rust code was brought up to Rust 1.75 while new patches posted this weekend port the code over to Rust 1.76 and then the upcoming Rust 1.77...

With Rust 1.77 they have now stabilized the single-field "offset_of" feature used by the kernel's Rust code. Rust 1.77 also adds a "--check-cfg" option that the Rust kernel code will likely transition to in the future. This follows the Rust for Linux policy of tracking the upstream Rust version upgrades until there is a minimum version that can be declared where all used features are considered stable.

This week the non-profit Rust Foundation announced the release of a report on what their Security Initiative accomplished in the last six months of 2023. "There is already so much to show for this initiative," says the foundation's executive director, "from several new open source security projects to several completed and publicly available security threat models."

From the executive summary: When the user base of any programming language grows, it becomes more attractive to malicious actors. As any programming language ecosystem expands with more libraries, packages, and frameworks, the surface area for attacks increases. Rust is no different. As the steward of the Rust programming language, the Rust Foundation has a responsibility to provide a range of resources to the growing Rust community. This responsibility means we must work with the Rust Project to help empower contributors to participate in a secure and scalable manner, eliminate security burdens for Rust maintainers, and educate the public about security within the Rust ecosystem...

Recent Achievements of the Security Initiative Include:

- Completing and releasing Rust Infrastructure and Crates Ecosystem threat models

- Further developing Rust Foundation open source security project Painter [for building a graph database of dependencies/invocations between crates] and releasing new security project, Typomania [a toolbox to check for typosquatting in package registries].

- Utilizing new tools and best practices to identify and address malicious crates.

- Helping reduce technical debt within the Rust Project, producing/contributing to security-focused documentation, and elevating security priorities for discussion within the Rust Project.

... and more!

Over the Coming Months, Security Initiative Engineers Will Primarily Focus On:

- Completing all four Rust security threat models and taking action to address encompassed threats

- Standing up additional infrastructure to support redundancy, backups, and mirroring of critical Rust assets

- Collaborating with the Rust Project on the design and potential implementation of signing and PKI solutions for crates.io to achieve security parity with other popular ecosystems

- Continuing to create and further develop tools to support Rust ecosystem, including the crates.io admin functionality, Painter, Typomania, and Sandpit

The Tiobe index tries to gauge the popularity of programming languages based on search results for courses, programmers, and third-party vendors, according to InfoWorld.

And by that criteria, "Google's Go language, or golang, has reached its highest position ever..." The language, now in the eighth ranked position for language popularity, has been on the rise for several years.... In 2015, Go hit position #122 in the TIOBE index and all seemed lost," said Paul Jansen, CEO of Tiobe. "One year later, Go adopted a very strict 'half-a-year' release cycle — backed up by Google. Every new release, Go improved... Nowadays, Go is used in many software fields such as back-end programming, web services and APIs," added Jansen...

Elsewhere in the February release of Tiobe's index, Google's Carbon language, positioned as a successor to C++, reached the top 100 for the first time. Python is #1 on both TIOBE's index and the alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which InfoWorld says "assesses language popularity based on how often language tutorials are searched on in Google." But the two lists differ on whether Java and JavaScript are more popular than C-derived languages — and which languages should then come after them. (Go ranks #12 on the Pypl index...)

TIOBE's calculation of the 10 most-popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. SQL
8. Go
9. Visual Basic
10. PHP

Pypl's calculation of the 10 most-popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. Java
3. JavaScript
4. C/C++
5. C#
6. R
7. PHP
8. TypeScript
9. Swift
10. Objective-C

A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project... for the public good." From a report: His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions." Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache.

Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm. Sysoev left F5 and the Nginx project in early 2022. Later that year, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, F5 discontinued all operations in Russia. Some Nginx developers still in Russia formed Angie, developed in large part to support Nginx users in Russia. Dounin technically stopped working for F5 at that point, too, but maintained his role in Nginx "as a volunteer," according to Dounin's mailing list post.

Dounin writes in his announcement that "new non-technical management" at F5 "recently decided that they know better how to run open source projects. In particular, they decided to interfere with security policy nginx uses for years, ignoring both the policy and developers' position." While it was "quite understandable," given their ownership, Dounin wrote that it means he was "no longer able to control which changes are made in nginx," hence his departure and fork.

At a press conference last week, a California Assemblymember joined the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in announcing a bill that, if passed, would require every public high school to teach computer science. (And establish CS as a high school graduation requirement by the 2030-31 school year.)

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says he noticed posters with CS-education advocacy charts and stats "copied verbatim" from the tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org. (And "a California Dept. of Education news release also echoed Code.org K-12 CS advocacy factoids.") The announcement came less than two weeks after Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi — whose goal is to make CS a HS graduation requirement in all 50 states by 2030 — was a keynote speaker at the Association of California School Administrators Superintendents' Symposium. Even back in an October 20 Facebook post, [California state assemblyman] Berman noted he'd partnered with Code.org on legislation in the past and hinted that something big was in the works on the K-12 CS education front for California. "I had the chance to attend Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration and chat with their founder, Hadi Partovi, as well as CS advocate Aloe Blacc. They've done amazing work expanding access to computer science education... and I've been proud to partner with them on legislation to do that in CA. More to come!"

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE: The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code.

Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems.

As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities.
A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone."

The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform."

The Register adds: Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...."

According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation."

Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

Last week Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

But now Microsoft "has announced a temporary reprieve for developers who use VS Code to connect to servers, clouds, container, and other devices running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu: Microsoft [had] pushed out an update to VS Code that bumps its glibc requirement, dropping support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (which uses an older version of glibc) in the process. Innocuous though it sounds, that move had a huge impact, leaving thousands of developers who use VS Code unable to connect to/work with devices running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or other Linux distros using glibc 2.27, including RHEL 7, CentOS 7, and Amazon Linux 2.

— "Screwed" was the term many of those affected used!

Well, good news: Microsoft says it plans to release a 'recovery' update for VS Code soon. This will restore the ability for developers to use the text editor's remote dev tools to connect to/work with machines running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and other, older Linux distros.

But only for the next 12 months.
"We hope this will provide the needed time for you and your companies to migrate to newer Linux distributions," Microsoft's senior product manager for VS Code posted on GitHub. He added that the software will "show the appropriate dialog and banner that you are connecting to an OS that is not supported by VS Code." (The updated was released on Thursday.)

He also thanked developers for their feedback and "for sharing your passion for VS Code and sharing how it is being used to enable various scenarios."

Thanks to Slashdot reader motang for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down its Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23, Meta announced the release of its Facebook Graph API v19.0, which included the news that the company would be deprecating its existing Facebook Groups API. The latter, which is used by developers and businesses to schedule posts to Facebook Groups, will be removed within 90 days, Meta said. This includes all the Permissions and Reviewable Features associated with the API, it also noted.

Meta explained that a major use case for the API was a feature that allowed developers to privately reply in Facebook Groups. For example, a small business that wanted to send a single message to a person who posted on their Facebook Group or who had commented in the group could be messaged through the API. However, Meta said that another change in the new v19.0 API would enable this feature, without the need for the Groups API. But developers told TechCrunch that the shutdown of the API would cause problems for companies that offer solutions to customers who want to schedule and automate their social media posts. [...]

What's more, developers tell us that Meta's motivation behind the API's shutdown is unclear. On the one hand, it could be that Facebook Groups don't generate ad revenue and the shutdown of the API will leave developers without a workaround. But Meta hasn't clarified if that's the case. Instead, Meta's blog post only mentioned one use case that would be addressed through the new v.19.0 API. [...] On Meta's forum for developers, one developer says they're "pretty shocked" by the company's announcement, noting their app relies on the Groups API and will essentially no longer work when the shutdown occurs. Others are frustrated that Meta hasn't clearly explained if posting on Groups will be done with a Page Access token going forward, as the way the announcement is worded it seems that part is only relevant for those posting private replies, not posting to the group as a whole. [...] the whole thing could just be some messaging mistake -- like Meta perhaps forgot to include the part where it was going to note what its new solution would be. There is concern, however, that Meta is deprioritizing developers' interests having recently shut down its developer bug portal as well.

Apple, in a blog post: We are delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle), a programming language for producing configuration. When thinking about configuration, it is common to think of static languages like JSON, YAML, or Property Lists. While these languages have their own merits, they tend to fall short when configuration grows in complexity. For example, their lack of expressivity means that code often gets repeated. Additionally, it can be easy to make configuration errors, because these formats do not provide any validation of their own. To address these shortcomings, sometimes formats get enhanced by ancillary tools that add special logic. For example, perhaps there's a need to make code more DRY, so a special property is introduced that understands how to resolve references, and merge objects together. Alternatively, there's a need to guard against validation errors, so some new way is created to validate a configuration value against an expected type. Before long, these formats almost become programming languages, but ones that are hard to understand and hard to write.

On the other end of the spectrum, a general-purpose language might be used instead. Languages like Kotlin, Ruby, or JavaScript become the basis for DSLs that generate configuration data. While these languages are tremendously powerful, they can be awkward to use for describing configuration, because they are not oriented around defining and validating data. Additionally, these DSLs tend to be tied to their own ecosystems. It is a hard sell to use a Kotlin DSL as the configuration layer for an application written in Go. We created Pkl because we think that configuration is best expressed as a blend between a static language and a general-purpose programming language. We want to take the best of both worlds; to provide a language that is declarative and simple to read and write, but enhanced with capabilities borrowed from general-purpose languages. When writing Pkl, you are able to use the language features you'd expect, like classes, functions, conditionals, and loops. You can build abstraction layers, and share code by creating packages and publishing them. Most importantly, you can use Pkl to meet many different types of configuration needs. It can be used to produce static configuration files in any format, or be embedded as a library into another application runtime.

We designed Pkl with three overarching goals:
To provide safety by catching validation errors before deployment.
To scale from simple to complex use-cases.
To be a joy to write, with our best-in-class IDE integrations.

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor now includes a voice command that launches GitHub Copilot Chat just by saying "Hey Code."

But one Linux blog notes that the editor has suddenly stopped supporting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — "a move causing issues for scores of developers." VS Code 1.86 (aka the 'January 2024' update) saw Microsoft bump the minimum build requirements for the text editor's popular remote dev tools to â¥glibc 2.28 — but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS uses glibc 2.27, ergo they no longer work.

While Ubuntu 18.04 is supported by Canonical until 2028 (through ESM) a major glibc upgrade is unlikely. Thus, this "breaking change" is truly breaking workflows...

It seems affected developers were caught off-guard as this (rather impactful) change was not signposted before, during, or after the VS Code update (which is installed automatically for most, and the update was pushed out to Ubuntu 18.04 machines). Indeed, most only discovered this issue after update was installed, they tried to connect to a remote server, and discovered it failed. The resulting error message does mention deprecation and links to an FAQ on the VS Code website with workarounds (i.e. downgrade).

But as one developer politely put it.... "It could have checked the libc versions and refused the update. Now, many people are screwed in the middle of their work."
The article points out an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will address the problem. On GitHub a Microsoft engineer posted additional options from VS Code's documentation: If you are unable to upgrade your Linux distribution, the recommended alternative is to use our web client. If you would like to use the desktop version, then you can download the VS Code release 1.85. Depending on your platform, make sure to disable updates to stay on that version.
Microsoft then locked the thread on GitHub as "too heated" and limited conversation to just collaborators.

In a related thread someone suggested installing VS Code's Flatpak, which was still on version 1.85 — and then disabling updates. But soon Microsoft had locked that thread as well as "too heated," again limiting conversation to collaborators.

Ivan Mehta reports via TechCrunch: Nearly a week after Apple announced big changes to the App Store because of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) rules, the company said that the market represents 7% of its global App Store revenues. The company's chief financial officer Luca Maestri said that the monetary impact of these changes will depend on choices made by developers to adopt different systems. "A lot will depend on the choices that will be made. Just to keep it in context, the changes applied to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global app store revenue," he said in reply to an analyst's question.

Because of DMA, Apple has to allow alternative app stores and let developers use third-party payment processors. The company plans to charge a core tech fee if an app crosses a million annual downloads across different app stores. Amid these changes, Apple noted a record quarter for App Store revenues. The company's overall services revenue was $23.1 billion with an 11% jump year-on-year. Apple continued its narrative of defending the App Store and its commission ecosystem by saying that it provides the best privacy and security. CEO Tim Cook emphasized that the company will fall short of providing the best experience to users because of these changes.

"If you think about what we've done over the years is, we've really majored on privacy, security and usability. And we've tried our best to get as close to the past in terms of the things that are -- that people love about our ecosystem as we can, but we are going to fall short of providing the maximum amount that we could supply, because we need to comply with the regulation," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The pace is picking up for the Apple Vison Pro apps ahead of the spatial computing device's Friday launch as developers ready their apps for the new platform. While just last week, only 150-plus apps had been specifically designed for the Vision Pro so far, according to a third-party analysis of the App Store, Apple announced today that more than 600 new apps and games are being readied for the Vison Pro ahead of its debut. These join the more than 1 million already compatible apps across iOS and iPadOS, the company says. [...]

The company says more than 600 apps and games have been designed to take advantage of the Vision Pro's capabilities and its 3D user interface that's navigated using your eyes, hands and voice. Several streaming apps have already announced their support, including Disney+, ESPN, MLB, PGA Tour, Max, Discovery+, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, Fubo, Crunchyroll, Red Bull TV, IMAX, TikTok and MUBI. The PGA Tour Vision app offers a golf game with real-time shot tracking across models of real golf courses, while the NBA app will allow streaming up to five broadcasts live or on-demand at once, Apple notes. Red Bull TV will include 3D maps of races. Soccer fans will also be able to stream MLS Season Pass via Apple's own Apple TV app. That app will offer access to Apple's Originals, more than 200 3D movies and Apple Immersive Video.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's adoption of Rust continues apace if a posting on the IT titan's careers website is anything to go by. Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down -- by two percent compared to the previous year -- recruitment persists at the Windows giant. In this case, the company is forming a team of Rustaceans to tackle a platform move away from C#.

The job, a principal software architect for Microsoft 365, has responsibilities that include "guiding technical direction, design and implementation of Rust component libraries, SDKs, and re-implementation of existing global scale C# based services to Rust." According to the post, the job lurks within the Substrate App Platform group, part of the Microsoft 365 Core Platform organization. The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft's cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent. Microsoft said: "We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond."

theodp writes: Visual Studio Magazine reports on new research on the effect of AI-powered GitHub Copilot on software development which sought to investigate the quality and maintainability of AI-assisted code compared to what would have been written by a human. Countering the positively-glowing findings of some other studies, the Coding on Copilot whitepaper from GitClear cites some adverse results.

"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability," explains the paper's abstract. "Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited." The paper concludes, "How will Copilot transform what it means to be a developer? There's no question that, as AI has surged in popularity, we have entered an era where code lines are being added faster than ever before. The better question for 2024: who's on the hook to clean up the mess afterward?" Further complicating matters, Computing Education in the Era of Generative AI (Feb. 2024 CACM) notes that "generating and inserting large blocks of code may be counterproductive for users at all levels. This requires users to read through code they did not write, sometimes at a more sophisticated level than they are familiar with."

Interestingly, the AI-generated code maintenance worries are reminiscent of concerns cited in the past for 'Google programmers', Stack Overflow copy-and-pasters, and stitchers of not-quite-compatible libraries, as well as earlier iterations of code generators, including C++ and other 'Next-Next-Finish' code wizards of the 90's and COBOL and PL/I applications generators (PDF) of the 80's. Everything old is new again, including code maintenance challenges.

The tech site IT Brew looks at an open-source tool that "uses AI to offer efficiency-minded suggestions to Python coders." Known as "Scalene," the profiler — a kind of debugger for performance issues — has been downloaded more than 900,000 times on GitHub. "It's awesome in general, and amazing for an academic project," UMass professor Emery Berger, who worked with PhD students Sam Stern and Juan Altmayer Pizzorno on the open-source tool, told IT Brew...

Scalene measures how much time and memory is spent on each line of code — both on average and at peak, [and] how much time is spent in efficient libraries and how much is spent in Python... By selecting a lightning-bolt icon, a user can "leverage the engine that powers ChatGPT to get an optimization" suggestion, Berger said. In one demo he showed IT Brew, an output recommended a less-memory-intensive move to reduce a very large array created by the code...

"If your Python code already runs fast enough, then you don't need a profiler. But if it's running slow, I think it's a very convenient profiler to reach for," Berger said.
Link via Dev News .