GitHub's Scientist Aims to Help Refactoring Critical Paths

GitHub has just made available Scientist 1.0, a Ruby library that will help developers refactor or rewrite their code with confidence, writes GitHub engineer Jesse Toth, and that was used at GitHub over the last few years for a number of projects. InfoQ has spoken with Toth.

Racket 6.4 Improves Security and Adds Incremental Garbage Collection

Racket, a multi-paradigm programming language belonging to the Lisp/Scheme family, has reached version 6.4, PLT announced. The new version adds several new features, including an incremental garbage collector (GC), and fixes a vulnerability in the web server.

GitHub Pages Moves to Jekyll 3.0 to Improve Performance

According to GitHub, Jekyll 3.0 will make GitHub Pages faster and easier to use, though the switch will not be painless for all existing sites due to some features being removed in the process.

Swift’s Benchmarking Suite is Now Open Source

Apple has open sourced Swift’s benchmarking suite, a key piece in tracking Swift performance and catching performance regressions when adding new features to the language.

Amazon Launches Lumberyard Game Engine, Featuring Integration with AWS and Twitch

Lumberyard is a free (as in “free-beer”) game engine and SDK that is suitable to create triple-A games, Amazon say, for Windows, Xbox One, and PS4, while support for Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android is coming.