Apple Open Sources FoundationDB

Apple has open sourced its distributed database core, FoundationDB, which it acquired back in 2015 from the homonymous company. FoundationDB is designed to handle large volumes of data stored across clusters of commodity servers and to favor data consistency by supporting fully global, cross-row ACID transactions.

New GCC 8.1 Supports Several Features of C++2a

GCC 8.1 is the latest major release of the GNU Compiler Collection, bringing experimental support for some parts of the upcoming C++2a standard. Additionally, GCC 8.1 improves profile driven optimizations and brings Go support up to version 1.10.1.

GitHub Checks API Enables Apps for Advanced Continuous Integration

GitHub Checks API aims to make it possible to integrate code checks into a continuous integration workflow. For example this could mean linting a source file and present the results directly in the pull request view. The feedback can be so detailed as desired, e.g., showing the line of code causing a problem, thus allowing the commit author to fix the issues and run a new check on the code.

PGP and S/MIME Encrypted Email Vulnerable to Efail Attack

A group of German and Belgian researchers found that PGP and S/MIME are vulnerable to an attack that leaks the plaintext of encrypted emails. The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the vulnerability and suggested to use alternative means to exchange secure messages. Yet, the vulnerability is not in PGP itself, according to GnuPG creator Werner Koch, who also said EFF comments were overblown.

Rust Has Got Existential Types

Version 1.26 of Rust adds support for existential types, improved match bindings, slice patterns, and some useful syntactic sugar. The Rust compiler has also become faster and supports 128 bit integers.