Version 10.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection has landed with new command-line options, a variety of optimisation improvements, and enhancements for working with the C-family, Fortran, AArch64 and Arm. Among the changes are an option to enable a new static analysis pass to help devs get rid of common errors, and an access function and type attribute “to describe how a function accesses objects passed to it”.
The major release also offers support for OpenACC 2.6 in the C, C++, and Fortran compilers, and includes implementations of additional C++20 and OpenMP 5.0 features, leading GCC closer to being fully able to work with the standard.
CockroachDB pushs out 20.1 to build “fast to last”
The team behind cloud-native SQL database CockroachDB has finished work on version 20.1 of its project, injecting it with the option to change primary keys while an app is online, ways of monitoring queries, SQL statements, and network performance, and ORM support.
The release also saw the addition of an encrypted backup feature, and improvements to role based access control, which is now also available in the community version of the database, and cooperation with certificate authorities.
Cassandra-challenger Scylla takes on DynamoDB next
Open source NoSQL-database Scylla has made it to its fourth major release, fitting the project with a DynamoDB-compatible API to free devs from their Amazon shackles if needed. Other improvements include more efficient Lightweight Transactions, and experimental change data capture. Details can be found on the Scylla blog.
Visual Studio Code 1.45 gives JS debugging a go
Almost in time to celebrate the project’s fifth anniversary, Microsoft has released VS Code 1.45. The update is mainly made up of smaller enhancements and improvements in the way the code editor can be used with Microsoft subsidiary GitHub. JavaScript developers however might be interested to hear the new version also includes a preview for a JavaScript debugger, and data science aficionados will see notebook support soon.
AWS changes EC2 prices, introduces Kendra to the enterprise world
Amazon’s cloud department has decided to rework the pricing models of its EC2 and inter-region data transfer offerings. While the latter is mostly of interest to those transferring data from the South America, Middle East, Africa, or Asia Pacific regions to other areas, EC2 price drops affect a wider user base and can be as high as 18 per cent in some cases. However, the “price reduction is not available for Convertible Reserved Instances, Compute Saving Plans or On-Demand instances”.
Other than that, AWS has finally made its enterprise search solution Amazon Kendra generally available. The new product was launched in late 2019 and is supposed to “enable organizations to index structured and unstructured data stored in different backends, such as file systems, applications, Intranet, and relational databases”.