218 lines
12 KiB
XML
218 lines
12 KiB
XML
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<channel>
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<title>LWN.net featured content</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/</link>
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<description>This feed contains pointers to all feature articles (those
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containing LWN original content and posted as standalone items) found on
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the site.
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</description>
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<language>en-us</language>
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<pubDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:01:01 +0000</pubDate>
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<lastBuildDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:01:01 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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<docs>https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification</docs>
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<webMaster>lwn@lwn.net</webMaster>
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<atom:link href="https://lwn.net/headlines/Features" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
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<item>
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<title>LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995490/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995490/</guid>
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<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
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<description>The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024 is available.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:42:27 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>An update on Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995383/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995383/</guid>
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<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
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<description>The kernel graphics driver for the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs is, rather
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famously, written in Rust, but it has achieved conformance with
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various graphics standards, which is also noteworthy. At the <a
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href="https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/">X.Org Developers Conference
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(XDC)&nbsp;2024</a>, Alyssa Rosenzweig gave an update on the status of the
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driver, along with some news about the kinds of games it can support (<a
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href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtLP5sAXYKo">YouTube video</a>, <a href="https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/contributions/284/attachments/230/310/slides.pdf ">slides</a>).
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There has been lots of progress since her talk at XDC last year (<a
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href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O36VFNdQHsE">YouTube video</a>),
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with, of course, still more to come.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:23:29 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>A new approach to validating test suites</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995276/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995276/</guid>
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<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
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<description><p>
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The first program that Martin Pool ever wrote, he said, had bugs; the ones he's writing
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now most likely have bugs too. The talk Pool gave at
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<a href="https://rustconf.com/">RustConf</a> this year was about a way to try
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to write programs with fewer bugs. He has developed a tool called
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<a href="https://mutants.rs/">
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cargo-mutants</a> that highlights gaps in test coverage by identifying
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functions that can be broken without causing any tests to fail.
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This can be a valuable complement to other testing techniques,
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he explained.
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</p>
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</description>
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<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:01:12 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>The performance of the Rust compiler</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995125/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995125/</guid>
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<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
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<description><p>
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Sparrow Li presented virtually at
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<a href="https://rustconf.com">
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RustConf</a>&nbsp;2024 about the current state of and
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future plans for the Rust compiler's performance. The compiler is relatively slow to compile
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large programs, although it has been getting better over time. The next big
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performance improvement to come will be parallelizing the compiler's parsing,
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type-checking, and related operations, but even after that, the project has
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several avenues left to explore.
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</p>
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</description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:10:27 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>AutoFDO and Propeller</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/</guid>
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<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
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<description>Rong Xu and
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Han Shen described the kernel-optimization techniques that Google uses in the <a
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href="https://lpc.events/event/18/sessions/180/#20240918">toolchains
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track</a> at the <a
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href="https://lpc.events/event/18/page/224-lpc-2024-overview">2024 Linux
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Plumbers Conference</a>.
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They talked about <a
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href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45290.pdf">automatic
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feedback-directed optimization</a> (AutoFDO), which can be used with the <a
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href="https://research.google/pubs/propeller-a-profile-guided-relinking-optimizer-for-warehouse-scale-applications/">Propeller</a>
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optimizer to produce kernels with better performance using profile
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information gathered from real workloads. There is a fair amount of
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overlap between these tools and the <a
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href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/bolt#bolt">BOLT</a>
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post-link optimizer, which was the subject of a <a
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href="https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/">talk</a> that directly preceded this session.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:15:19 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>OSI readies controversial Open AI definition</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995159/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995159/</guid>
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<dc:creator>jzb</dc:creator>
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<description><p>The <a href="https://opensource.org/">Open Source Initiative</a>
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(OSI) has been working on defining <a
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href="https://opensource.org/ai">Open Source AI</a>&mdash;that is what
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constitutes an AI system that can be used, studied, modified, and
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shared for any purpose&mdash;for almost two
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years. Its <a
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href="https://opensource.org/about/board-of-directors">board</a> will
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be voting on the <a href="https://opensource.org/ai/drafts/the-open-source-ai-definition-1-0-rc2">Open Source AI Definition</a> (OSAID) on Sunday,
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October&nbsp;27, with the 1.0 version slated to be published on
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October&nbsp;28. It is never possible to please <em>everyone</em> in
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such an endeavor, and it would be folly to make that a goal. However,
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a number of prominent figures in the open-source community have voiced
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concerns that OSI is setting the bar too low with the OSAID&mdash;which
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will undo decades of community work to cajole vendors into adhering to
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or respecting the original <a href="https://opensource.org/osd">Open Source
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Definition</a> (OSD).</p>
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</description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:02:36 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>Kernel optimization with BOLT</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/</guid>
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<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
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<description>A pair of talks in the <a
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href="https://lpc.events/event/18/sessions/180/#20240918">toolchains
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track</a> at the <a
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href="https://lpc.events/event/18/page/224-lpc-2024-overview">2024 Linux
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Plumbers Conference</a> covered different tools that can be used to
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optimize the kernel. First up was Maksim Panchenko to describe the <a
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href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/bolt#bolt">binary
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optimization and layout tool</a> (BOLT) that Meta uses on its production
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kernels. It optimizes the kernel binary by rearranging it to improve its
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code locality for
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better performance. A <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/">subsequent article</a> will cover the second talk, which
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looked at <a
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href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45290.pdf">automatic
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feedback-directed optimization</a> (AutoFDO) and other related techniques
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that are used to optimize Google's kernels.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:39:48 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>realloc() and the oversize importance of zero-size objects</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995196/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995196/</guid>
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<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
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<description>Small objects can lead to large email threads. In this
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case, the GNU C Library (glibc) community has been having an extensive
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debate over the handling of zero-byte allocations. Specifically, what
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should happen when a program calls <a
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href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/malloc.3.html"><tt>realloc()</tt></a>
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specifying a size of zero? This is, it seems, a topic about which some
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people, at least, have strong feelings.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:36:41 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/994575/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/994575/</guid>
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<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
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<description>The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024 is available.
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</description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:42:13 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>Toward safe transmutation in Rust</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/994334/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/994334/</guid>
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<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
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<description><p>
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Currently in Rust, there is no efficient and safe way to turn an array of bytes
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into a structure that corresponds to the array. Changing that was the topic of
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Jack Wrenn's talk this year at
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<a href="https://rustconf.com">
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RustConf</a>:
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<a href="https://jack.wrenn.fyi/blog/safety-goggles-for-alchemists/">
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"Safety Goggles for Alchemists"</a>. The goal is to be able to "transmute" —
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Rust's name for this kind of conversion — values into arbitrary user-defined
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types in a safer way. Wrenn justified the approach that the project has taken to
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accomplish this, and spoke about the future work required to stabilize it.
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</p>
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</description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:40:38 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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<item>
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<title>Free-software foundations face fundraising problems</title>
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<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/993665/</link>
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<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/993665/</guid>
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<dc:creator>jzb</dc:creator>
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<description><p>In July, at the GNOME <a
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href="https://lwn.net/Articles/983203/">annual general meeting</a> (AGM),
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held at <a
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href="https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/12/20/guadec-2024-in-denver-colorado/">GUADEC
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2024</a>,
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the message from the GNOME Foundation board was that all was well,
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financially speaking. Not <em>great</em>, but the foundation was on a
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break-even budget and expected to go into its next fiscal year with a
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similar budget and headcount. On October&nbsp;7, however, the board <a
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href="https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/10/07/update-from-the-board-2024-10/">announced</a>
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that it had had to make some cuts, including reducing its staff by
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two people. This is not, however, strictly a GNOME problem: similar
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organizations, such as the Python Software Foundation (PSF), KDE&nbsp;e.V.,
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and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are seeing declines in
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fundraising while also being affected by inflation.</p>
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</description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:52:28 +0000</pubDate>
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</item>
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</channel>
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</rss> |