Microsoft has announced full support for PyTorch 1.2 on Azure. v1.2 of the machine learning library hit the streets earlier this month. Microsoft said its Azure Machine Learning service gets a dedicated PyTorch estimator, to make it easy to run PyTorch training scripts on any compute target, while Azure Notebooks now provides a “free, cloud hosted Jupyter notebook server with PyTorch 1.2 pre-installed”. Meanwhile, its Data Science Virtual Machines now include PyTorch 1.2. Microsoft said it also contributed “enhanced ONNX export capabilities” to 1.2, to make it easier to use the library in production. Full details are here.

TypeScript reaches 3.6

Apart from that Redmond pulled version 3.6 of its homegrown JavaScript alternative  TypeScript out of the hat. New features include stricter checking for iterators and generator functions. The UX around Promises has been improved to better inform users when a Promise has been mishandled. Unicode support for identifiers has been improved when emitting to ES2015 and later targets. Full details, including a quartet of breaking changes, can be found here.

Emacs hits v26.3

The latest version of Emacs has hit the streets. The team behind the venerable open source editor has described v26.3 as a maintenance release, with just two changes listed. First up is a new option ‘help-enable-completion-auto-load’, which allows the disabling of a feature introduced in 26.1 which loads files during completion of ‘C-h f’ and ‘C-h v’ according to ‘definition-prefixes’. Second up is support for the new Japanese era name. The update also means a new GPG key for GNU ELPA package signature checking

GitHub brings devs, compliance, closer

GitHub has made it easier to devs to keep their friends in accounts and compliance happy – in the US at least. The Microsoft-owned repo firm said it has achieved both the AICPA American Institute of CPAs’ Service Organization Controls (SOC) 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance for GitHub Enterprise Cloud. Meanwhile, for international customers, it announced it has “maintained compliance with two IAASB International Standards on Assurance Engagements: the ISAE 3000 and 3402.” The SOC 2 standard covers security compliance for software-as-a-service vendors in the US, while SOC 1 covers security controls relating to a service organization’s customers financial statements.