Featured Articles

JavaScript Async - Composing Promises
Ian Elliot

Although async and await are the stars of the async programming world, Promises still have advantages - in particular you can write code which waits for some combination of Promises to resolve.  Here we look at how to write your own promise-combining functions.

Where you store data is as important to the computer as the data itself, yet the importance of the address is often overlooked. In this introduction to the low-level mechanisms of addressing in assembler, it is surprising how easy it is to recognize familiar high-level abstractions. 

News and Comment

Rust Is Safer But Do We Use It Safely
15 Jul | Mike James

Rust seems to be the great hope to create a safer programming language. It provides sophisticated checks on what you are doing that make it more difficult to write code that can hide a bug or allow an exploit. The question that new research attempts to answer is - are we writing Rust in a safe way?

An open source software toolkit for Unity that aims to reduce cybersickness when using virtual reality holds the promise of welcome relief to many VR headset users. GingerVR was named after the plant which is often used as an antidote for nausea, one of the classic symptoms of cybersickness. 

Apple has announced a new set of tools to help educators teach coding to students from grade school to college. In addition to significant enhancements to the Develop in Swift and Everyone Can Code curricula, Apple is also starting a new online course for teachers, available at no cost.

Mozilla has released an updated dataset for its Common Voice project, along with a major update to its DeepSpeech speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines.

Google has announced Open Usage Commons as an organization to manage trademarks of its open source projects, inviting other open source projects to join.  However, the inclusion of Istio as one of the three inaugural projects has prompted immediate criticism from IBM. The Linux Foundation has also raised concerns. 

AGE, a multi-model graph database extension for PostgreSQL has been announced. AGE is the successor to AgensGraph, and is an Apache Incubator project. 

The Redis team has released several new modules. RedisRaft is brand new and still under development, while RedisAI and Redis Gears were announced a year ago, and are now generally available. 

We don't usually combine Java and JavaScript in a single news item. But we'll make an exception since Udacity has new intermediate level Nanodegree programs in both of them, starting on July 14th. And with financial support on offer, a discount for each month of enrollment, this seems a good time to work towards enhanced career prospects. 

Rust, Go, Perl, and Scratch all see improvements in their position in the rankings and C retains the top spot for the third month running. 

Apache's distributed stream processing framework Samza has been updated to version 1.5. Improvements include a simplified job submission workflow that provides improved security, and the ability to move containers without having to restart an application.