Break point: Grafana, Wasmer, Rust, Julia, PyTorch Live, Fleet, and Qt Creator

Break point: Grafana, Wasmer, Rust, Julia, PyTorch Live, Fleet, and Qt Creator

Version 8.3 of observability and data visualization platform Grafana has been made available. The update fixes a series of bugs, prevents folders that contain alerts from being deleted, introduces support for AWS Metric Insights, and presents full alerting preview values in tooltips. New limits to title widths in BarGauge and the y label width in visualisations promise to improve readability.

Wasmer gets fitted with virtual filesystem, kicks off improved iOS support

Developers using WebAssembly runtime Wasmer can start taking version 2.1 of the project for a spin. Highlights of the release include iOS support, an in-memory filesystem for environments where access to the host filesystem is limited, and a new variant of wasmer-js that uses the Wasmer WASI Rust implementation. It is also the first version to support programming languages Lisp and Crystal. Upcoming releases are supposed to follow a “milestone-driven public roadmap and delivery process”.

No need to panic, Rust 1.57 is here

The team behind the Rust programming language has pushed version 1.57 out of the door, introducing the panic! macro and assert! to const contexts. Support is expected to be expanded in upcoming releases, at the moment however either a static string or a single &str interpolated value is needed to call the macro. Other than that Rust 1.57 stabilises try_reserve for Vec, String, HashMap, HashSet, and VecDeque, meaning backing storage for these types can be fallibly allocated, and supports custom profiles in package manager Cargo.

Julia 1.7 makes it cross the finish line

Another programming language that upped its version number this week is Julia. As laid out at JuliaCon this year, Julia 1.7 includes a new BLAS demuxing library for switching the backing BLAS library at runtime, and type inferencing improvements. It also gives developers a hand in writing literals for multidimensional arrays and comes with additional threading capabilities. The release is really packed with interesting additions, so a quick look into the release notes to learn more about the newly added Apple Silicon support, the syntax for destructing objects by property name, and the changed manifest format is highly recommended.

Meta throws PyTorch and React Native together

At the recent PyTorch Developer Day, the Meta AI team (ex Facebook AI) presented developers with PyTorch Live — a tool library for building machine learning mobile apps using PyTorch and React Native. The project is meant to lower the barrier to building ML apps for those interested and comes with tutorials for using image classification and question answering as a start. The resulting projects are meant to run on newer Android and iOS versions (10.0/12.0 and above).

JetBrains launches first polyglot IDE

While JetBrains products tend to be on the language specific and complex side, a new addition to the company’s IDE portfolio has come to turn over a new leaf. Fleet is a multi-language IDE which can be operated in a lightweight editor mode, or a more encompassing smart IDE mode that uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine on the backend. It also offers the option to invite other parties to join a workspace and collaborate on a given file. 

JetBrains’ VP of developer advocacy Hadi Hariri used the announcement to assure developers who are afraid the new product could mean a replacement of the tools they’ve grown to like that investments in PyCharm and Co will continue, though Fleet is meant to make use of any new advances as well.

Qt Creator 6 lands with universal macOS binaries

Version 6 of Qt Creator is now available for downloading. The Qt IDE now provides universal Intel+ARM binaries for macOS, a global search for Files in All Project Directories, and supports multi-cursor editing as well as C++ editing with clangd. The Qt Creator team also made progress on the implementation of container handling capabilities.

Users who had trouble developing with the IDE on Linux before, should run into fewer issues with v6.0 as external processes are now launched in a separate server process.