Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness?

"The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far." If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward.

Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented.

He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage.
2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future."

One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser"

Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE: The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code.

Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems.

As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities.
A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone."

The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform."

The Register adds: Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...."

According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation."

Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

According to a job listing spotted by AFTVNews, Amazon makes it clear that the company plans to ditch Android for its own "VegaOS" operating system. "The new platform is said to rely on React Native and would require new apps to be built," reports 9to5Google. From the report: As spotted by AFTVNews, a job listing from Amazon was looking for a "Fire TV Experience Software Development Engineer." The job listing's description makes it abundantly clear that a key part of the role is focused on the transition from Android to the rumored "VegaOS," because it quite literally says that's what is happening, with Amazon saying that Fire TV is transitioning from "FOS/Android" (Fire OS/Android) to "native/Rust" and even explicitly mentioning React Native. The listing, which has since been removed, provides extremely strong evidence of Amazon's plans, which is probably why it was so quickly removed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's adoption of Rust continues apace if a posting on the IT titan's careers website is anything to go by. Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down -- by two percent compared to the previous year -- recruitment persists at the Windows giant. In this case, the company is forming a team of Rustaceans to tackle a platform move away from C#.

The job, a principal software architect for Microsoft 365, has responsibilities that include "guiding technical direction, design and implementation of Rust component libraries, SDKs, and re-implementation of existing global scale C# based services to Rust." According to the post, the job lurks within the Substrate App Platform group, part of the Microsoft 365 Core Platform organization. The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft's cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent. Microsoft said: "We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond."

Steam's newest hit survival game, Palworld, has been accused of plagiarising designs from Pokemon, as social media users negatively highlight its creator's historical association with generative AI tools. VideoGamesChronicle: Palworld by Japanese studio Pocketpair released into early access on PC and Xbox on Friday, and immediately became a breakout success, with its creator claiming 2 million sales in 24 hours. The huge launch exposure inevitably reignited discourse that has followed Palworld since its announcement, around its character designs' apparent similarities to Pokemon. Although the gameplay of Palworld is closer to survival games like Ark and Rust than Game Freak's series, many social media users have noted the obvious influences its character designs have taken from the Nintendo series.

Following Palworld's release on Friday, some X users collated perceived similarities between Palworld's 'Pals' and Pokemon. "It's not even subtle about its rip offs, how much else has it stolen?" wrote one user. Another added: "I want to like Palworld, but I don't know if I can support running existing Pokemon through a fusor and passing them off as 'new' IP." The situation is further muddled in the eyes of some by Pocketpair's historical relationship with generative AI tools. Artist Zaytri noted on X that one of its previous titles was 'AI: Art Imposter,' a game which literally utilises an AI image generator as its core mechanic. The user also highlighted multiple historical X posts by Pocketpair's CEO Takuro Mizobe, in which he appeared to praise the potential of AI image generators for content creation.

"A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language..." Phoronix reported Monday, "that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time."

The project was started "just for fun" over Christmas, according to a post on X by Canonical-based Linux kernel engineer Andrea Righi, adding "I'm pretty shocked to see that it doesn't just work, but it can even outperform the default Linux scheduler (EEVDF) with certain workloads (i.e., gaming)." Phoronix notes the a YouTube video accompanying the tweet shows "a game with the scx_rustland scheduler outperforming the default Linux kernel scheduler while running a parallel kernel build in the background."

"For sure the build takes longer," Righi acknowledged in a later post. "This scheduler doesn't magically makes everything run faster, it simply prioritizes more the interactive workloads vs CPU-intensive background jobs." Righi followed up by adding "And the whole point of this demo was to prove that, despite the overhead of running a scheduler in user-space, we can still achieve interesting performance, while having the advantages of being in user-space (ease of experimentation/testing, reboot-less updates, etc.)"

Wednesday Righi added some improvements, posting that "Only 19 lines of code (comments included) for ~2x performance improvement on SMT isn't bad... and I spent my lunch break playing Counter Strike 2 to test this patch..."

And work seems to be continuing, judging by a fresh post from Righi on Thursday. "I fixed virtme-ng to run inside Docker and used it to create a github CI workflow for sched-ext that clones the latest kernel, builds it and runs multiple VMs to test all the scx schedulers. And it does that in only ~20min. I'm pretty happy about virtme-ng now."

serviscope_minor shares a Phoronix post: A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code. The Linux kernel is predominantly made up of C code with various hand-written Assembly plus the growing work around supporting Rust within the Linux kernel. While it's not clear yet if there's sufficient weight to make it a reality, a Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been restarted over potentially seeing the Linux kernel C code converted to C++ in the future.

Back on 1 April 2018 was a set of 45 patches by Red Hat engineer David Howells to begin converting the kernel to C++. This would allow the mainline kernel to make use of inline template functions, inline overloaded functions, class inheritance, and other features not currently supported by the Linux kernel with its C code. A bit hard to make serious discussions that day and ultimately the patches resided on the Linux kernel mailing list for six years without much discussion. serviscope_minor adds: It is notable that the current discussion is somewhat different from the infamous discussions in the past.

Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2023 seemed to touch on all the themes of the year, with a story about AI, two about electric cars, two stories about Linux, and two about the Rust programming language.

And at the top of this list, the #1 story of the year drew over 100,000 views...

• Can California's Power Grid Handle a 15x Increase in Electric Cars?

• Linux Desktop Powers Consider Uniting For an App Store

• Conservatives Bombarded With Facebook Misinformation Far More Than Liberals In 2020 Election, Study Suggests

• 'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety

• Ask Slashdot: Where Can You Buy a Desktop PC That Makes Linux Easy to Install?

• Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux

• Rust Safety Is Not Superior To C++, Bjarne Stroustrup Says

• 'Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down'

• Truck Thief Gunned Down by Owner After AirTag Gives Away Location

• Symbolic Wyoming Proposal Urges Voluntary Phase-out of EV Purchases by 2035

Interestingly, a story that ran on New Year's Eve of 2022 attracted so much traffic, it would've been the second-most visited story for all of 2023 — if it had run just a few hours later. That story?

Systemd's Growth Over 2022.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It's a question that comes up all the time on Reddit. Etsy even created a special page for programmer-themed gift suggestions (showing more than 5,000 results). While CNET sticks to broader lists of "tech gifts" — and a separate list for "Star Wars gifts" — other sites around the web have been specifically honing in on programmer-specific suggestions. (Blue light-blocking glasses... A giant rubber duck... The world's strongest coffee... A printer that transfers digital images onto cheese...)

So while in years past Amazon has said they laughed at customer reviews for cans of uranium, this year Amazon has now added a special section that's entirely dedicated to Gifts for Computer Programmers, according to this funny rundown of 2023's "Gifts for Programmers" (that ends up recommending ChatGPT gift cards and backyard office sheds):
From the article: [Amazon's Gifts for Programmers section] shows over 3,000 results, with geek-friendly subcategories like "Glassware & Drinkware" and "Novelty Clothing"... For the coder in your life, Amazon offers everything from brain–teasing programming puzzles to computer–themed jigsaw puzzles. Of course, there's also a wide selection of obligatory funny t–shirts... But this year there's also tech-themed ties and motherboard-patterned socks...

Some programmers, though, might prefer a gift that's both fun and educational. And what's more entertaining than using your Python skills to program a toy robot dog...? But if you're shopping for someone who's more of a cat person, Petoi sells a kit for building a programmable (and open source) cat robot named "Nybble". The sophisticated Arduino-powered feline can be programmed with Python and C++ (as well as block-based coding)... [part of] the new community that's building around "OpenCat", the company's own quadruped robotic pet framework (open sourced on GitHub).

Connor Jones reports via The Register: DLang is among the newer breed of memory-safe languages being endorsed by Western security agencies over the past few years, the same type of language that cyber criminals are switching to. At least three new DLang-based malware strains have been used in attacks on worldwide organizations spanning the manufacturing, agriculture, and physical security industries, Cisco Talos revealed today. The attacks form part of what's being called "Operation Blacksmith" and are attributed to a group tracked as Andariel, believed to be a sub-division of the Lazarus Group -- North Korea's state-sponsored offensive cyber unit. [...]

The researchers noted that DLang is an uncommon choice for writing malware, but a shift towards newer languages and frameworks is one that's been accelerating over the last few years -- in malware coding as in the larger programming world. Rust, however, has often shown itself to be the preferred choice out of what is a fairly broad selection of languages deemed to be memory-safe. AlphV/BlackCat was the first ransomware group to make such a shift last year, re-writing its payload in Rust to offer its affiliates a more reliable tool. A month later, the now-shuttered Hive group did the same thing, and many others followed after that. Other groups to snub Rust include China-based Sandman which was recently observed using Lua-based malware, believed to be part of a wider shift toward Lua development from Chinese attackers.

ZDNet reports that "At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Japan, Linus Torvalds and his good friend Dirk Hohndel, the head of Verizon open source, talked about the current state of Linux: Speaking of maintainers, Hohndel brought up the question of "maintainer fatigue and how draining and stressful this role is...." Torvalds replied, "It's much easier to find developers; we have a lot of developers. Some people think that you have to be a superdeveloper who can do everything to be a maintainer, but that's not actually true...."

Hohndel commented that the aging of the kernel community is a "double-edged sword." Torvalds agreed, but he noted that "one of the things I liked about the Rust side of the kernel, was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers. We can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people...."

Hohndel and Torvalds also talked about the use of the Rust language in the Linux kernel. Torvalds said, "It's been growing, but we don't have any part of the kernel that really depends on Rust yet. To me, Rust was one of those things that made technical sense, but to me personally, even more important was that we need to not stagnate as a kernel and as developers." That said, Torvalds continued, "Rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing. But I think during next year, we'll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to use it actively. So it's one of those things that is going to take years before it's a big part of the kernel. But it's certainly shaping up to be one of those."
Torvalds also said he enjoyed the fact that open source "has become the standard within the industry."

But later Hohndel, calling AI "autocorrect on steroids," asked Torvalds if he thought he'd ever see submissions of LLM-written code. "I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code." But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. "It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all...."

But, "What about hallucinations?," asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own."

The Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation" has an associated project called Alpha-Omega funded by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with a mission to catalyze sustainable security improvements to critical open source projects and ecosystems.

It was established nearly two years ago in February of 2022 — and this month announced plans to continue supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative: 2022 was also the first full year of operation for the Rust Foundation — an independent nonprofit dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language and supporting its global community. Given the considerable growth and rising popularity of the Rust programming language in recent years, it has never been more critical to have a healthy and well-funded foundation in place to help ensure the safety and security of this important language.

When the Rust Foundation emerged, OpenSSF recognized a shared vision of global open source security baked into their organizational priorities from day one. These shared security values were the driving force behind Alpha-Omega's decision to grant $460k USD to the Rust Foundation in 2022. This funding helped underwrite their Security Initiative — a program dedicated to improving the state of security within the Rust programming language ecosystem and sowing security best practices within the Rust community. The Security Initiative began in earnest this past January and has now been in operation for a full year with many achievements to note and exciting plans in development.

While security is a clear priority of the Rust language itself and can be seen in its memory safety-critical features, the Rust Project cannot reasonably be expected to foster long term, sustainable security without proper support and funding. Indeed, there is still a pervasive attitude across technology that cybersecurity is being managed and prioritized by "someone else." The unfortunate impact of this attitude is that critical security work often falls on overburdened and under-resourced open source maintainers. By prioritizing the Security Initiative during their first full year in operation, the Rust Foundation has taken on the responsibility of overseeing — and supporting — security improvements within the Rust ecosystem while ensuring meaningful progress...

Alpha-Omega is excited to announce our second year of supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative. We believe that this funding will build on the good work and momentum established by the Rust Foundation in 2023. Through this partnership, we are helping relieve maintainer burdens while paving an important path towards a healthier and more secure future within the Rust ecosystem.
Meanwhile, this month the Rust Foundation announced that downloads from Rust's package repository crates.io have now reached 45 billion — and that the foundation is "committed to facilitating the healthy growth of Rust through funding and resources for the community and the Project.

"After conducting initial planning and research and getting approval from our board of directors, we are pleased to announce our intention to help fulfill this commitment by developing a Rust Foundation training and certification program." We continue to be supportive of anyone creating Rust training and education materials. In fact, we are proud to have provided funding to a few individuals involved in this work via our Community Grants Program. Our team is also aware that commercial Rust training courses already exist and that global training entities are already developing their own Rust-focused programs. Given the value of Rust in professional open source, this makes sense. However, we are eager to introduce a program that will allow us to direct profits back into the Rust ecosystem.

As a nonprofit organization, we sit in a unique position thanks to the tools, connections, insights, administrative support, and resources at our disposal — all of which will add value to course material aimed at professional development and adoption. We see our forthcoming program as one tool of many that can be used to verify skills for prospective employers, and for those employers to build out their professional teams of Rust expertise. We will remain supportive of existing training programs offered by Rust Foundation member companies and we'll look for ways to ensure this remains the case as program development progresses... There is no set launch date for the Rust Foundation training and certification program yet, but we plan to continue laying high-quality groundwork in Q4 of 2023 and the first half of 2024.

Python "come with downsides," argues a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming."

"Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo.

A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA...

"Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language.

Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees."
Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download."


In June, Lattner did an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains' Kotlin language, a Java rival endorsed by Google for Android mobile development, continues to scale up Tiobe's index of language popularity, reaching the 15th spot in the November 2023 rankings...

Software quality services company Tiobe cites Kotlin advantages including interoperability with Java and unrivaled Android accommodations as reasons for the language's rise. Kotlin, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said, also fits in with a modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid null pointer exceptions by design. "Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position," Jansen said. It remains to be seen if it can ever scale as high as a top four slot, he added...

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index this month, Kotlin was ranked 13th with a 1.76% share, having slipped slightly year-over-year.
Kotlin's rank on the TIOBE index rose three positions in the last month — after rising two positions the month before. TIOBE's CEO says the language has now achieved its highest ranking ever on the index, surpassing 2017's "first wave of Kotlin popularity...when Google announced first class support for Kotlin on Android."

Rust now ranks #20 on the index, behind Delphi/Object Pascal, Swift, Ruby, and R.

Here's TIOBE November rankings for top-20 most popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. PHP
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Assembly Language
11. Scratch
12. Fortran
13. Go
14. MATLAB
15. Kotlin
16. Delphi/Object Pascal
17. Swift
18. Ruby
19. R
20. Rust

ZDNet shares on update on "Rust in Linux: Where we are and where we're going next," citing a talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Richmond, Virginia by Linux/Rust developer Miguel Ojeda: In brief, Rust Linux is continuing to mature and is getting strong support from developers and vendors, such as Cisco, Samsung, and Canonical... Rust is taking the steps it needs to become — along with C — a fully-fledged member of the Linux language toolchain... That's not to say that we're ready to retire C for Rust just yet. In fact, that day is unlikely ever to come. But Rust is definitely on its way to becoming an important language for Linux development...

As for the day-to-day work that's required to make Rust fully integrated with Linux, the "official" website of the initiative is now the self-explanatory Rust for Linux. This site is your one-stop source for all things Rust on Linux... However, the move forward has not been straightforward. Rust on Linux developers have discovered some problems along the way. For example, while deadlocks, when two or more threads are waiting on the other to finish, are safe in Rust, because they don't result in undefined behavior, they're not safe in the Linux kernel. The programmers are working on fixing this issue...

A related issue is that there's growing interest in backporting Rust support into long-term support (LTS) versions of Linux, specifically 5.15 and 6.1. Some people are especially showing interest in the super LTS Linux 6.1 kernel. However, Linux doesn't generally allow backports into LTS Linuxes. So, if you really, really want fully featured Rust support in an older LTS kernel, you're going to need to pay for it in one way or the other. Another general rule that Rust developers have decided they're going to try to "break" is the rule against duplicate drivers. Usually, no one wants anyone wasting time reinventing the wheel, but some maintainers are open to the idea of experimenting with Rust, by starting simple with a driver they're already familiar with...

These movements are small steps forward, but they're all critical for making Rust equal to C as a Linux programming language.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This Sunday, November 19, makes a full 25 years since the original Half-Life first hit (pre-Steam) store shelves. To celebrate the anniversary, Valve has uploaded a feature-packed "25th anniversary update" to the game on Steam, and made the title free to keep if you pick it up this weekend. Valve's 25th Anniversary Update page details a bevy of new and modernized features added to the classic first-person shooter, including:

- Four new multiplayer maps that "push the limits of what's possible in the Half-Life engine"
- New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though-leave that to the modders)
- "Proper gamepad config out of the box" (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro)
- Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup
- "Verified" support for Steam Deck play ("We failed super hard" on the first verification attempt, Valve writes)
- Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840x1600
- Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn't been enough to perfect the meta)
- New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods
- A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game
- Various bug fixes
- "Removed the now very unnecessary 'Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards' setting"

In addition, the new update includes a host of restored and rarely seen content, including:

- Three multiplayer maps from the "Half-Life: Further Data" CD-ROM: Double Cross, Rust Mill, and Xen DM
- Four restored multiplayer models: Ivan the Space Biker, Proto-Barney (from the alpha build), a skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man (from "Further Data")
- Dozens of "Further Data" sprays to tag in your multiplayer matches
- The original Half-Life: Uplink demo in playable form

In Chrome, JavaScript (and WebAssembly) code are both executed by Google's open source V8 engine — which already has garbage-collecting capabilities. "This means developers making use of, for example, PHP compiled to Wasm, end up shipping a garbage collector implementation of the ported language (PHP) to the browser that already has a garbage collector," writes Google developer advocate Thomas Steiner, "which is as wasteful as it sounds."

"This is where WasmGC comes in." WebAssembly Garbage Collection (or WasmGC) is a proposal of the WebAssembly Community Group [which] adds struct and array heap types, which means support for non-linear memory allocation... In simplified terms, this means that with WasmGC, porting a programming language to WebAssembly means the programming language's garbage collector no longer needs to be part of the port, but instead the existing garbage collector can be used.
Sometime on Halloween, Steiner wrote that in Chrome, WebAssembly garbage collection is now enabled by default. But then he explored what this means for high-level programming languages (with their own built-in garbage collection) being compiled into WebAssembly: To verify the real-world impact of this improvement, Chrome's Wasm team has compiled versions of the Fannkuch benchmark (which allocates data structures as it works) from C, Rust, and Java. The C and Rust binaries could be anywhere from 6.1 K to 9.6 K depending on the various compiler flags, while the Java version is much smaller at only 2.3 K! C and Rust do not include a garbage collector, but they do still bundle malloc/free to manage memory, and the reason Java is smaller here is because it doesn't need to bundle any memory management code at all. This is just one specific example, but it shows that WasmGC binaries have the potential of being very small, and this is even before any significant work on optimizing for size.
The blog post includes two examples of WasmGC-ported programming languages in action:

• "One of the first programming languages that has been ported to Wasm thanks to WasmGC is Kotlin in the form of Kotlin/Wasm."

• "The Dart and Flutter teams at Google are also preparing support for WasmGC. The Dart-to-Wasm compilation work is almost complete, and the team is working on tooling support for delivering Flutter web applications compiled to WebAssembly."

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu: The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated... [T]he app's graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it's a real looker... Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components... You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app.
It's also possible to select a refresh interval "from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, 'very fast' can increase CPU usage)." And selecting an app or process "activates a big red button you can click to 'end' the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)..."

"If you don't like the 'Windows-iness' of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative."

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains is previewing a dedicated IDE for the Rust programming language, called RustRover, which combines coding assistance with an integrated Rust toolchain. Available in preview September 13, RustRover is positioned to simplify the Rust coding experience while "unlocking the language's full potential," JetBrains said. Capabilities include real-time feedback, code suggestions, simplified toolchain management, and team collaboration.

Previously, JetBrains offered IntelliJ Rust, an open source Rust plugin for IntelliJ IDEs. But with RustRover, the company aims to provide a dedicated product with enhanced functionality for the growing Rust developer community. JetBrains also has been previewing a multi-language editor and IDE, called JetBrains Fleet, that supports Rust development...

RustRover will have some similarities to JetBrains' other language-specific IDEs including PyCharm for Python, GoLand for Go, and RubyMine for Ruby.
RustRover integrates with version control systems, supporting GitHub and Git.