👋 Hi readers!
In today's issue:
- Google's experimenting with ways to phase out cookies and has proposed an API for trust tokens
- July 26 - Aug.1 recap, which comes with a comprehensive list of releases from last week organized by language, tools, and more (premium only)
- Julia 1.5 is now available
If you'd like to read this week's premium content, Inside Dev is offering a 14-day free trial for a limited time only, so you can sample the perks paid readers enjoy daily and see if you like it. When you sign up for the trial, you'll also be able to access other special features, like:
- List of August's virtual events and hackathons
- Weekly curation keeping up-to-date on the newest top tricks/tips and tutorials from experts and more organized by languages including JavaScript, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Golang
- Tuesday's weekly curation of free developer books, tools, and courses/certifications, as well as discounted office gear including coffee machines, AirPods, suitcases, laptops, and more
- The July 2020 and upcoming mid-year recap, all of which come with a comprehensive list of releases from last week organized by language, tools, and more
- Full-time remote developer jobs
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Sheena
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Google has started experimenting with ways to replace third-party cookies in Chrome. The company announced a proposed API for trust tokens, for instance, that is now available for testing by developers. Trust tokens are meant to promote user trust across sites by generating unique cryptographically-signed tokens for each user that advertisers can't track.
More:
- Read more about the Trust Token API on its GitHub page.
- Google announced Chrome will eventually completely phase out third-party cookies in January once it can do so in a way that meets the needs of both advertisers and users.
- The company aims to get rid of all cookies by 2020.
- The browser will also stop updating its user-agent string that reports to sites what version of the browser a user is on, which can be a way of tracking that user, especially when combined with other information.
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Linux Kernel 5.8 has been released. It features networking improvements, as well as some driver and architecture fixes. Highlights include:
- Support added to swap Fn and Ctrl keys for Apple keyboards
- The inclusion of the AMD energy driver makes it possible to read the Zen/Zen2 energy sensors
- Power management updates in Kernel
- Improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, as well as Microsoft exFAT driver improvements
- Graphics driver and other improvements added for Qualcomm Adreno 405-640-650, Intel Tiger Lake, AMD GPU TMZ, updates on Radeon driver
For more information about updates, check out the changelog.
ITSFOSS
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Julia 1.5 is now available. Some highlights:
- Struct layout and allocation optimizations, which the Julia team says can dramatically reduce heap allocations in some workloads
- Multithreading API stabilization and improvements, including improved thread-safety for some top-level expressions like type definitions, global assignments, modules
- "Soft scope" in the REPL and a new
@ccall macro
- Automated rr-based bug reports
For a detailed list of changes, click here.
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RedMonk Programming Language Rankings
JULY 26-AUG. 1 2020 GENERAL TOP INDUSTRY NEWS RECAP:
Events:
- Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2020 conference will be held online for free this year instead of in Las Vegas as originally planned because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The three-week will also take place from Nov. 30 to Dec. 18 instead of Nov. 30 to Dec. 4. Subscribe to receive updates about the conference as AWS releases more news about the event over the next few months.
Language Trends:
- The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings is now available. JavaScript came in first, followed by Python, Java, PHP, and C++, and C# (both tied in fifth place, respectively). More top languages according to the rankings: 7) Ruby and CSS, 9) TypeScript, 10) C, 11) Swift and Objective-C, 13) R, 14) Scala, 15) Go and Shell, 17) PowerShell, 18) Perl, 19) Kotlin, and 20) Rust.
Future Industry Trends To Keep An Eye On: Artificial Intelligence
- Intel, MIT, and the Georgia Institute of Technology announced The Machine Inferred Code Similarity (MISIM) system, an automated engine that can identify when two pieces of code, data structures, or algorithms perform identical or similar tasks. Such a tool could help developers significantly by reducing the time programmers spend debugging. The tool also reduces development costs, as the total estimated cost of debugging is $312b per year.
- The news comes as GPT-3, another potentially disruptive AI-powered tool, captured headlines after the tool was able to generate code with just a description. Just last week, yet another web developer used OpenAI's new text-generating neural network model, GPT-3, to create a tool that delivers CSS code with just a description. Zoltán Szőgyényi built a Tailwind CSS code generator that currently only works with buttons, inputs, and lists. Read Inside Dev's deep dive into other GPT-3 examples relevant to web development, and its implications for the future of the industry here.
Politics:
- India will teach coding skills in schools from 6th grade onwards, thanks to a new government policy that will be implementing this September. The news comes after IT research firm Gartner noted earlier this year India could be on its way to becoming the world's 'software superpower' this year, although this depended on investments in workforce development and country-level infrastructure. Meanwhile, although the United States is considered the leader in IT software, ncube estimates that by 2021, there will be a shortage of 1.4 million software developers with 400,000 software developer graduates in the country. Employment in the field is expected to grow 21% from 2018 to 2028.
- U.S. federal immigration officials said that new foreign students can't enter the country if they plan on taking their classes fully online this fall. ICE recently issued rules that barred all international students from staying in the U.S. if they are exclusively taking online classes in the fall, before backtracking on this rule. A majority of U.S. graduate students in the fields of electrical engineering (81%), computer science (79%), and statistics (69%), are international students, according to a 2017 analysis.
Funding:
- Stack Overflow raised $85m in Series E round led by GIC, in what is the company's first funding round in five years. Stack Overflow will use the funding towards the development of the Teams software as a service knowledge management and collaboration offering, expand into new markets, and support other endeavors as outlined in the company's roadmap for the community. While announcing the latest funding update, the New-York based Stack Overflow also addressed the difficulties the company struggled with the pandemic, revealing they are now doing better.
Language and Tool Releases / Updates:
- For a comprehensive list of all updates and releases, covering languages, browsers, version control, IDEs, and other tools from last week, check out the next story, available for premium readers only. Not a premium reader? Click here to sign up for a free 14-day trial so you can read it!
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⚒️ JULY 26-AUG. 1 2020 LANGUAGES AND TOOLS RECAP:
BROWSERS / VERSION CONTROL / IDEs / OS:
VERSION CONTROL:
- GitHub has launched a public roadmap, a public repository to keep developers updated about what new features and functionality the platform will release in the next few quarters. As a result, teams can plan ahead better while also offering earlier feedback to GitHub about what they like and don't.
- Git 2.28 is now available. Some highlights include a new configuration option...
BROWSERS:
CHROME:
FIREFOX:
- Firefox 79 is now available. Some highlights include...
EDGE:
IDEs:
- JetBrains has released...
OS:
LANGUAGES:
JAVASCRIPT / GENERAL FRONT-END:
- Next.js 9.5 has been released. Highlights include..
PHP:
PYTHON:
RUBY / RUBY ON RAILS:
JULIA:
OTHER TOOLS AND NEWS:
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Tweet of the Day: Matt Hobbs – the Head of Frontend Development at the U.K.'s Government Digital Service - points out more visitors of Gov.uk, a U.K. government website, surprisingly used Safari than Chrome in July 2020.
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Your take: Do you prefer Safari or Chrome?
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Quick Hits:
- The OpenTelemetry .NET SDK is now available in beta. The release comes with instrumentation libraries for ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, HTTP client, SQL client, and gRPC client.
- Looks like 0 == "foobar" will not return true in PHP 8.0 now that the "PHP RFC: Saner string to number comparisons" has passed.
- Men's Journal says this is the best-customized skincare for men.*
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