Thanks to lots of feedback for the first Go 1.18 beta, the Go team was able to identify some issues in its new generics support. Corrections have been made and a second beta is now available which should make the implementation more stable. The additional beta also means that the final release will be issued later than expected: the team currently plans to get a release candidate out in February and present a completed version in March.

Delta Lake 1.1 dabbles in more flexibility

Storage layer Delta Lake, once denoted Databricks’ “biggest innovation to date“, can now be downloaded in version 1.1. After updating an installation, Delta Lake will automatically repartition the output data before writing to files when using merge operations on partitioned tables, and provide Python type annotations. Starting with v1.1, users are also allowed to set Hadoop FileSystem configurations via DataFrameReader/Writer options and use arbitrary expressions in the replaceWhere DataFrameWriter option.

Open Service Mesh reaches production stability

The team behind the Open Service Mesh project pushed out its first major release. Besides stability improvements it comes with support for TCP server-first protocols for in-mesh traffic, a new internal control plane event management framework, and validations to reject invalid SMI TrafficTarget resources. Open Service Mesh was first introduced in 2020 as a Microsoft-initiated reference implementation of the service mesh interface specification and has since made its way into the CNCF sandbox. 

Swift and C++ interoperability working group announced

Developers who have been looking for ways to use C++ together with Swift can now help make interoperability for the two languages happen. A newly founded working group plans to meet weekly to develop and design an interoperability model, and have an eye on the Swift compiler changes necessary.

GNU C Library learns about Unicode 14 and OpenRISC 

The C library glibc landed in version 2.35, sporting quite the list of new major features. Amongst other things the project now supports Unicode 14, the C.UTF-8 locale, and the OpenRISC architecture on Linux. The update also includes fixes for four new vulnerabilities, enhancements to handle huge pages better, dynamic linker improvements, and some new maths functions.

Elastic concludes 7.x series

In a bid to prepare users for the upcoming eighth major release of its software stack, Elastic launched Elastic Stack 7.17 earlier this week. It’s the last iteration of the 7.x series and is mainly of interest because of the Upgrade Assistant included. The latter allows users to walk through the steps required to make the jump from v7.17 to 8 up front, learn about changes and check different remediation options. Feature-wise there isn’t much to play with in 7.17, though the update includes deduplication capabilities which promise to improve performance.