Python 3.8.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.

The newest version of Python is released today! Python 3.8 has been available in beta versions since the summer, but on October 14th, 2019 the first official version is ready. Now, we can all start playing with the new features and benefit from the latest improvements.

What does Python 3.8 bring to the table? The documentation gives a good overview of the new features. However, this article will go more in depth on some of the biggest changes, and show you how you can take advantage of Python 3.8.

Two years after the "Stack Clash" vulnerability came to light, the LLVM compiler is working on adding protection against it similar to the GCC compiler mitigation.

The Stack Clash vulnerability pertains to clashing/smashing another program's stack while circumventing existing stack protections at the time. Stack Clash opens up the door to memory corruption and arbitrary code execution. Linux x86/x86_64 wasn't the only one affected but also the BSDs and Solaris. Those unfamiliar with it or wanting to refresh your memory of it can do so via this Qualys blog post with the firm having discovered this vulnerability.

Please note that there's an official pocl maintenance policy in place. This text describes the policy and how you can get your favourite project that uses OpenCL to remain regression free in the future pocl releases.

Version 1.4 has been released of POCL, the "Portable Computing Language" implementation that allows for a portable OpenCL implementation to be executed on CPUs as well as optionally targeting other accelerators via HSA or even CUDA devices.

POCL 1.4 brings support for LLVM Clang 9.0, with that open-source compiler stack doing a lot of POCL's heavy lifting. Support meanwhile for pre-6.0 LLVM releases were removed. POCL 1.4 also adds support for building relocatable POCL binaries and improves SPIR/SPIR-V support for CPU devices.

This week we welcome Elana Hashman (@ehashdn) as our PyDev of the Week! Elana is a director of the Open Source Initiative and a fellow of the Python Software Foundation. She is also the Clojure Packaging Team lead and a Java Packaging Team member. You can see some of her work over on Github. You can also learn more about Elana on her website. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!

Eclipse Che 7, an open source in-the-browser development environment, allows you to define custom workspaces for your software development. Think of a workspace as you would think of a development PC: You have an operating system, programming language support, and all the tools necessary to write code. In this article, I’ll introduce the .NET developer to this new world and highlight ways you can use Eclipse Che to your advantage.

Some times you may require to convert any string to lower case (all letters). This tutorial will help to convert a string (any case) to lower case as showing in the below image.

I manage releases for a bunch of free & open-source software. Just about every time I ship a release, I find a novel way to fuck it up. Enough of these fuck-ups have accumulated now that I wanted to share some of my mistakes and how I (try to) prevent them from happening twice.

The Vitis unified software platform from FPGA vendor Xilinx is the result of five-year project to create software development tools using familiar languages like C++ and Python to develop a wide range of applications for its reprogrammable chip.

“Open source back in the late nineties – and even throughout the 2000s – was really hard to use,” ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland says. “Our job,” he continues, “was to make it much easier for developers to use open source and much easier for enterprises to use open source.”

Now 10 years in the wild, Google’s Go programming language has certainly made a name for itself. Lightweight and quick to compile, Go has stirred significant interest due to its generous libraries and abstractions that ease the development of concurrent and distributed (read: cloud) applications.

But the true measure of success of any programming language is the projects that developers create with it. Go has proven itself as a first choice for fast development of network services, software infrastructure projects, and compact and powerful tools of all kinds.

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group (ECD WG), a vendor-neutral open source collaboration that will focus on development tools for and in the cloud. The ECD WG will drive the evolution and broad adoption of emerging standards for cloud-based developer tools, including language support, extensions, marketplaces, and developer workspace definition. Founding members of the ECD WG include Broadcom, EclipseSource, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG, and Typefox among many others.

With cURL having this many features (with the general mass of them being totally unknown to me, let alone how you use them) got me thinking… What if you could do a game show style challenge for them?

By an anonymous commenter, I got pointed to that Unicode (in Qt) is slightly more complicated than I had considered when writing the code: I missed to handle planes beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and the ‘surrogates’ between code points 0xD800 and 0xDFFF. In a series of recently pushed Git commits I addressed problem of surrogates and fixed some more issues. Some preparatory work has been done to support more planes in the future, but as of now, only the BMP is supported. For details, please have a look at the five commits posted on 2019-10-12.