//No Comment - Swift 3, Faster Parallel & Ruby 2.4.0
Written by Ian Elliot
Thursday, 15 September 2016
Members of the IProgrammer team each have their own favorite languages and we try to keep up with all the latest developments. These are the most recent three and as we have nothing to add they are presented with //No Comment.
•Swift 3.0 Released!
•Faster parallel computing
•Ruby 2.4.0-preview2 Released
Sometimes the news is reported well enough elsewhere and we have little to add other than to bring it to your attention.
No Comment is a format where we present original source information, lightly edited, so that you can decide if you want to follow it up.
Swift 3.0, the first major release of Swift since it was open-sourced, is now officially released! Swift 3 is a huge release containing major improvements and refinements to the core language and Standard Library, major additions to the Linux port of Swift, and the first official release of the Swift Package Manager.
Swift 3 is a source-breaking release, largely due to the changes in SE-0005 and SE-0006. These changes not only impact the names of the Standard Library APIs, but also completely change how Objective-C APIs (particularly from Cocoa) import into Swift. Many of the changes are largely mechanical, but they can be numerous in a typical Swift project.
To help with moving to Swift 3, Xcode 8.0 contains a code migrator that can automatically handle many of the need source changes. There is also a migration guide available to guide you through many of the changes — especially through the ones that are less mechanical and require more direct scrutiny.
This week, at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are presenting a new programming language, called Milk, that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets.
In tests on several common algorithms, programs written in the new language were four times as fast as those written in existing languages. But the researchers believe that further work will yield even larger gains.
Though ISO/IEC 30170:2012 doesn’t specify details of the Integer class, Ruby had two visible Integer classes: Fixnum and Bignum. Ruby 2.4 unifies them into Integer. All C extensions which touch the Fixnum or Bignum class need to be fixed.
Ruby ignores exceptions in threads unless another thread explicitly joins them. With report_on_exception = true, you can notice if a thread has died due to an unhandled exception.
Ruby has deadlock detection around waiting threads, but its report doesn’t include enough information for debugging. Ruby 2.4’s deadlock detection shows threads with their backtrace and dependent threads.
A repository containing any PostgreSQL extension you can imagine for Linux distributions is something that might be valuable if you are trying to save some time.
The GCHQ Christmas Challenge has become a pre-Christmas tradition. While it is primarily targeted at school students working in teams, GCHQ encourages both children and adults to give it a try.
