In Berkeley, California — the birthplace of PostgreSQL — it's spring: plum and cherry blossoms, courting finches and college students, new plans for the summer, and the first beta release of the database system. Every year, the first beta of the next PostgreSQL version comes out in April or May, for a final release in September. PostgreSQL 9.3 beta 1 was released to the public on May 13th, and contains a couple dozen new features both for database administrators and application developers.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Go and Rust — objects without class (lwn.net)
Since the advent of object-oriented programming languages around the time of Smalltalk in the 1970s, inheritance has been a mainstay of the object-oriented vision. It is therefore a little surprising that both "Go" and "Rust" — two relatively new languages which support object-oriented programming — manage to avoid mentioning it. Both the Rust Reference Manual and The Go Programming Language Specification contain the word "inherit" precisely once and the word "inheritance" not at all. Methods are quite heavily discussed, but inheritance is barely more than a "by the way".
Friday, May 3, 2013
UNICEF Tells Slacktivists: Give Money, Not Facebook Likes (theatlantic.com)
It’s easier than ever to support a good cause – all you have to do is hit the like button. The organization gets one more supporter and you get positive publicity among your friends. But even though it’s important to be liked, likes can’t fund medicine, water or food. In this campaign for Unicef Sweden, we highlight the absurdness of our blind faith in likes, to raise money for vaccine.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Download Google fonts to your desktop (googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk)
The goal of Google Fonts has always been to bring beautiful, open-source fonts to the web, fast and free of cost. Starting today, you can download these fonts for offline access on your desktop. We’ve made all of the fonts from the Google Fonts directory available in SkyFonts, a tool from Monotype that allows you to install and sync fonts from the web onto your Windows or Mac OS X devices.
Friday, April 5, 2013
The Baseline Compiler Has Landed (blog.mozilla.org)
This wednesday we landed the baseline compiler on Firefox nightly. After six months of work from start to finish, we are finally able to merge the fruits of our toils into the main release stream.
Baseline (no, there is no *Monkey codename for this one) is IonMonkey’s new warm-up compiler. It brings performance improvements in the short term, and opportunities for new performance improvements in the long term. It opens the door for discarding JaegerMonkey, which will enable us to make other changes that greatly reduce the memory usage of SpiderMonkey. It makes it easier and faster to implement first-tier optimizations for new language features, and to more easily enhance those into higher-tier optimizations in IonMonkey.
Our scores on the Kraken, Sunspider, and Octane benchmarks have improved by 5-10% on landing, and will continue to improve as we continue to leverage Baseline to make SpiderMonkey better.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research (brendaneich.com)
I gave a brief talk last night at the Mozilla Research Party (first of a series), which happened to fall on the virtual (public, post-Easter-holiday) celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary.
Mozilla is 15. JavaScript is nearly 18. I am old. Lately I mostly just make rain and name things: Servo (now with Samsung on board) and asm.js. Doesn’t make up for not getting to name JS.
Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine (link)
Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That’s why we’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.
Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.
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