Avalonia 11 has been released with support for more platforms, automated testing, and Input Method Editor (IME) support for text input.

DataStax has announced support for vector search on Astra DB and DataStax Enterprise, opening the option for storing data as vector embeddings to support uses including generative AI applications like those built on GPT-4.

Google has suggested a far-reaching addition to the web which it calls "Web Integrity Standard". This solves a problem that is important not only to Google but to the entire economy of the web. Some users claim it is the death of ad-blocking and the introduction of DRM for web pages. But could it secure the long-term future of the web?

Rather later than planned, the results of the latest Rust Developer Survey, which was conducted in December 2022, are out. They show that more people than ever before are using Rust and that around half of users do so on a daily basis.

GnuCOBOL has been updated to add improved dialect handling including changed defaults to better match the selected dialect, a complete new dialect GCOS. The new version also has  support for more COBOL statements, intrinsic functions and syntax from both "old" and new dialects. 

Microsoft has announced a preview release of a Unity extension for Visual Studio Code. The extension builds on the C# Dev Kit currently in preview.

Amazon has released a new CodeGuru extension that can be used to identify common problems such as code cell execution order, incorrect API calls, and security.

The August 2023 TIOBE Index is published today and records the fact that Julia, a dynamic language for technical computing that runs MATLAB and R-style programs and has achieved popularity among the scientific computing community, is included in the top 20 for the very first time. For a young language this is a remarkable achievement.

Regarded as the first analogue computer and named for the Greek island where it was found in a sunken ship, the  Antikythera Mechanism is over 2000 years old. Now a functioning replica has been built that uses 3D printed parts and there's a Kickstarter campaign for it. 

Our weekly digest lists the week's news, new titles added to our Book Watch Archive and our weekly book review. This week's top featured articles is an extract from Programming the ESP32 in MicroPython by Mike James and Harry Fairhead.

This year's SIGGRAPH takes place next week and now we bring you the Real-Time Live! Trailer - a taste of what you might expect if you attend the early evening presentation in Los Angeles in person or follow the exclusive live streaming on Twitch.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan, who founded SciHub in 2011 is the recipient of the 2023 EEF Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge.

The Flutter consulting firm Very Good Ventures (VGV) has released Dart Frog 1.0, an open source and lightweight framework designed to help Flutter and Dart developers maximize their productivity by having a unified tech stack that enables sharing tooling and models.

There's a new release of Nim, the systems programming language, with improvements including ORC memory management as a default.

The obvious answer is - it all depends on what you mean by "fast". It will make some things better and inevitably make some things worse. But after agonizing for a long time, the fate of the GIL is sealed.

DevOps is more than just a fusion of development and operations. It is the cultural change that organizations everywhere are adopting to become more agile and innovate at scale.​ CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) is one of its central tenets. Here we look at three short online courses on the topic from Coursera, edX and Udacity.

Lightbend has announced a new developer experience for Kalix. Lightbend produces cloud-native microservices frameworks while Kalix is a Platform-as-a-Service, developed by Lightbend, that combines an API-first, database-less programming model with a serverless runtime.

A tweet from Marcus Hutter last month announced a new winner of the €500.000 Prize for Compressing Human Knowledge. €5.187 was awarded to Saurabh Kumar for setting a new world record in compressing a 1GB excerpt of Wikipedia. Why the odd number? It's in recognition of beating the previous record by 1.04%.