Programming News Archives

The Mold high speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD recently has been going through a rewrite from C++ to Rust as well as having high ambitions of eventually becoming the default linker on Linux systems. Today marks the release of Mold 3.0 for this Rust-based high performance linker.

Edison Design Group has open-sourced their EDG C/C++ front-end that has been known in the commercial world for its extensive dialect support and other features. The EDG C++ front-end has been used by the likes of Intel C++ Compiler classic, NVIDIA CUDA NVCC, and even Microsoft Visual Studio for IntelliSense.

Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers.

SIMDjson is the open-source, high performance JSON parser that surprisingly began making use of AVX-512 to deliver big performance gains years ago. SIMDjson has continued further refining itself to deliver even greater speeds and out today is SIMDjson 5.0.

A new blog post published on Thursday covers the experimental support for SIMD with the Go programming language. This expanding Go SIMD support also includes a platform-independent API for making use of SIMD with modern processors.

A big patch series sent out this weekend for the Linux kernel's perf subsystem removes the embedded Python and Perl scripting in favor of standalone Python scripts with a new Python perf module. This perf module for Python written in C is much faster than the status quo.

Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward.

The Rust security response working group and Crates.io team have issued a warning that a targeted attack is underway against key Rust programming language developers.

Last month Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm. Modular was the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame. Released today was Mojo 1.1 and also marks the project recently now beginning code contributions from the community to its compiler.

Days after the recent release of GNU Coreutils 9.12, Rust Coreutils 0.12 was released overnight for advancing this alternative Rust-based implementation of these core utilities.

While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we've seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaffected.

The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems.

While still ultimately working toward Git 3.0 with SHA-256 hashes by default and the "main" branch name by default, among other breaking changes (and potentially coming around the end of 2026), Git 2.56-rc0 is now available for testing.

The first alpha release of the upcoming OpenSSL 4.1 release is now available for testing with some GREASE and DTLS 1.3 support along with more AVX-512 performance optimizations.

Rustls as the modern TLS library implementation written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release. This morning's Rustls 0.23.44 release enables post-quantum secure ML-DSA certificates by default.

Rust Coreutils 0.11 was just released as this alternative to the GNU Coreutils. Besides the long-running task of catching up the GNU Coreutils compatibility with the GNU test suite and never-ending work on optimizing the performance, Rust Coreutils 0.11 is quite a nice release for its improved error messages.

Rust 1.98 released today and is headlined the debut of new algebraic floating-point methods.

Go 1.27 was released today as the newest version of this programming language from Google's Go team.

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently relayed a request to see some fresh PHP performance benchmarks. So here are some fresh numbers of PHP 7.4 through the latest PHP 8.5 code plus the current Git state of PHP 8.6 ahead of the official PHP 8.6.0 release later in the year. With PHP 8.6 is also a fresh look at the JIT performance enabled too.

Modular, the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame, has open-sourced their Mojo systems programming language! This comes following the recent acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm.

A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP.

It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker.

The release candidate of PoCL 7.2 is now available for testing of this Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL that allows for CPU-based execution or via alternative LLVM back-ends allows for OpenCL on Level Zero, NVIDIA GPUs, and even remote devices/hardware.

Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development.

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc.

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 released on Thursday as this popular, open-source BLAS library providing optimized support for a variety of CPUs/architectures. OpenBLAS 0.3.34 continues working on squeezing more performance out of today's processors as well as delivering other new features.

GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow.

Git 2.55 is out today as the latest stable update to this distributed version control system.

ZLUDA as a reminder is the open-source project that began as drop-in CUDA support for Intel graphics hardware and then was quietly funded by AMD for years as a drop-in CUDA replacement on AMD GPUs that went open-source after losing funding. That was then taken down and since late 2024 ZLUDA then began focusing on multi-GPU CUDA focused on AI after beginning to receive funding from an unspecified party. Now, unfortunately, funding has once again been cut from that unnamed party but in turn ZLUDA is focusing on PhysX and better Windows support.

The 46-year-old BASIC09 programming language has new compiler support with a front-end having been developed for the LLVM compiler stack. BASIC09 was developed in 1980 for the Motorola 6809 CPU running with the OS-9 operating system. With this LLVM compiler front-end, you can write BASIC09 code for modern software and hardware.

The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster.

Epic Games announced today they have created a new version control system that is now open-source as Lore. Given the proliferation and excellence of Git, you may be wondering why Epic Games is pursuing another VCS option... They are specifically catering Lore to games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes.

Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default.

Pragtical, the lightweight open-source code editor that prides itself on using just ~50MB of RAM and ~10MB of disk space while being a full-featured code editor, is tacking on more features. Most notable with the new Pragtical release is adding an SDL-based GPU back-end for this MIT-licensed editor.

Redis 8.8 reached GA today for the Redis open-source project providing a high performance, in-memory data store.

Multikernel Technologies Inc has been working on a multi-kernel architecture for the Linux kernel while in addition to that they have been developing KernelScript as a domain-specific language for carrying out Linux kernel customizations and app-specific optimizations.

Wild Linker 0.9 was released today as the latest version of this very fast linker for Linux systems that is written in the Rust programming language.

A new release of chipStar is now available as the open-source tool for compiling and running HIP/CUDA code in a vendor-neutral manner with the SPIR-V intermediate representation on OpenCL or even Intel Level Zero as the run-time alternative. This is part of the ambitious effort to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP code to ultimately run on alternative vendors with increasing levels of success.

The GTK-based GUI version of the Vim text editor, gVim, now has support in place for the modern GTK4 toolkit as an alternative to its long present GTK2/GTK3 support.

Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language.

Back in 2023 the Vulkan API introduced its initial Cooperative Matrix extension and necessary SPIR-V integration for helping with machine learning / AI inferencing use. Since then the cooperative matrix support has continued to be built upon for helping Vulkan in AI/ML areas. Now the OpenCL API is also introducing similar cooperative matrix extensions.

Zed, the cross platform, open-source text/code editor written by the developers behind the Atom editor, has finally reached version 1.0.

OpenBLAS 0.3.33 is out today as the latest update to this vendor-neutral, optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library.

Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions.

Rust 1.95 was released to the wild today as the latest feature update to this popular programming language.

Jemalloc 5.3.1 was released today with next month marking four years since the prior release, jemalloc 5.3.0. While the version bump may not seem like much, jemalloc 5.3.1 comes with many performance improvements, new features, and other enhancements.

Mold 2.41 is out as the latest major update to this high performance linker and viable alternative to the linkers from the GNU and LLVM projects.

While the Meson build system has been capturing much of the limelight in recent years by open-source projects, the cross-platform CMake build system also shows no signs of slowing down and continues evolving with new features and functionality.

Rust Coreutils 0.8 was released today as the newest major release to this alternative to GNU Coreutils.

The Rust-For-Linux crew is preparing to raise the minimum supported Rust version for building the Linux kernel and and similarly also bumping the minimum supported version of bindgen, the tool for generating Rust FFI bindings for C code in the kernel.