• An Early Port Of GCC To AMD's GCN Architecture

  While still in its early stages, there's a port in the works of the GNU Compiler Collection for AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) instruction set architecture.

  Longtime SUSE toolchain expert Jan Hubicka started a port of GCC to AMD GCN a few weeks back. Hubicka has been experimenting with porting GCC to GCN for running on recent generations of GPUs. He noted in an email to Phoronix that it's still a bit early to report on, but the slides are now uploaded for any interested readers.

• The State Of GNU's GDB Debugger In 2016

  At the GNU Tools Cauldron that took place earlier this month in Hebden Bridge, UK was the annual status update of the GDB debugger.

  Red Hat developer Pedro Alves talked about the state of the GNU Debugger with some recently-accomplished changes plus other work on the horizon for this widely-used GNU program.

Last week, Oracle disowned NetBeans. The company announced it was turning its Java-based NetBeans over to the Apache Software Foundation. Now, Oracle is changing its tune on both NetBeans and Java Enterprise Edition (JEE).

Oh, don't get me wrong. Oracle still doesn't want to manage NetBeans. But Oracle claims it's not just dumping the NetBeans integrated developer environment (IDE) code. In an email, Bill Pataky, VP of Oracle Mobile Development Program and Developer Tools, told me, "Oracle is opening the governance model of NetBeans, not dropping support. Oracle has three products that depend on NetBeans." These are:

• Ada Gets Promoted To Being A First-Class Language In Coreboot

  Coreboot has mainlined a months-old patch to make the Ada programming language "a first class citizen" in this low-level open-source project.

  As of today in Coreboot GNAT runtime system was also added today for the Ada code.

• LLVM Still Pursuing Apache 2.0 License + GPLv2 Compatibility

  COMPILER --
  It's been a while since last talking about the discussions among LLVM developers about re-licensing the project. The re-licensing is moving forward and they are settling on the Apache 2.0 license plus explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2.

  For the past year they've been eyeing the Apache 2 license for the LLVM stack over their University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license.

• Update on Node.js npm Tool and Express Module

  The second day at Node Interactive Europe last week had two keynotes that concentrated on specific tools and modules. Kat Marchán talked about the npm packaging tool, and Doug Wilson explored the state of the express module.

• Git Developers Want Your Feedback (2016 Git Survey)

• GitHub gets all grown-up with better code review, project management, etc

  The GitHub Universe event has kicked off in San Francisco, with a number of new GitHub features announced by CEO Chris Wanstrath.

  GitHub's main product is a collaborative source code repository, which you can use on the public cloud or in your own private deployment. There are now over 19 million open source projects hosted on GitHub, with 5.8 million active users.

  The focus of today's announcements is on project management and workflow. A new Project dashboard lets you create cards from pull requests, issues or notes, and organize them into groups such as Backlog, In Progress, and Ready.

• JDK 9 release delayed another four months

  Oracle's asking for more time to complete JDK 9.

  The chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, took to the Java developer's mailing list to say that while work on JDK 9 is coming along nicely “We are not, unfortunately, where we need to be relative to the current schedule.”

  The hard part of JDK 9 is “Project Jigsaw”, an effort to “design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself and to the JDK.” Reinhold says “it's clear that Jigsaw needs more time.”

• Pass the 'Milk' to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

  MIT boffins have created a new programming language called “Milk” that they say runs code four times faster than rivals.

  Professor Saman Amarasinghe says the language's secret is that changes the way cores collect and cache data.

  Today, he says, cores will fetch whole blocks of data from memory. That's not efficient when working on tasks like big data, when only some of a block's content is needed by an application that may want to work on only a few items across very large data set.

• Node.js: Building Better Technology and a More Diverse Community

• Open Source Mobile Dev Tool Onsen UI Breaks Free from AngularJS Dependency

  Monaca today announced Onsen UI 2.0, a UI framework and tools for building HTML5-based native mobile apps, is now JavaScript framework-agnostic, having broken from its AngularJS dependency roots.

  The open source Onsen UI is itself based on the popular open source Apache Cordova/PhoneGap projects, which facilitate creating native iOS and Android apps with one codebase based on technologies usually used for Web development: HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

• The Python Packaging Ecosystem

  There have been a few recent articles reflecting on the current status of the Python packaging ecosystem from an end user perspective, so it seems worthwhile for me to write-up my perspective as one of the lead architects for that ecosystem on how I characterise the overall problem space of software publication and distribution, where I think we are at the moment, and where I'd like to see us go in the future.