LFE Brings Lisp to the Erlang Virtual Machine

After 8 years of development, Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) has reached version 1.0, bringing stable support for Lisp programming on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). LFE was created by Robert Virding, one of the initial developers of Erlang. InfoQ has spoken with Duncan McGreggor, current maintainer of LFE.

GitHub’s DGit Improves Reliability, Performance, and Availability

GitHub has been quietly rolling out DGit, short for “distributed Git”, a new distributed storage system built on top of Git with the aim of improving reliability, availability, and performance of using GitHub.

Rust 1.8 Introduces New Cargo-based Build System and more

Rust 1.8 adds a couple of new language features and a number of improvements to the standard library. Additionally, it introduces a new Cargo-based build system for rustc which can be seen as the first step towards bootstrapping Rust.

Go 1.7 to Improve Compilation Speed and Generate Faster Code

When Go 1.7 development cycle has still about a couple of weeks to go, Go committer Dave Cheney has reported on the team efforts to improve the toolchain for the coming release.

Microsoft Experimenting with Using Synthetic DNA for Digital Data Storage

Microsoft is carrying out experiments with synthetic DNA for digital data storage and has recently agreed to purchase ten million strands of DNA from genetics startup Twist Bioscience.