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Featured Articles

MicroPython is great, but sometimes you need to go beyond it. This extract from Programming the ESP32 RISC V in MicroPython, part of the I Programmer Library, shows you how to access the hardware.

Technical debt and expiring LTS versions, make Java modernisation a must – and a strategic opportunity for anyone tasked with integrating AI into business-critical systems.

Programming News and Views

After six years of work, Linux has finally been freed of the dreaded strncpy. Was it really so bad? And was it worth the work?

Microsoft has announced the availability of the release candidate of TypeScript 7. This release is significant because it has been rewritten in native code, so is built on a completely new foundation. The developers say it is often about ten times faster than TypeScript 6.0, which will be the last version of the JavaScript-based version.

The Linux Foundation has launched Appia Foundation with support from major players including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. The Appia Foundation aims to establish 'standardized conformity specifications across the AI value chain'.

Redis has released Iris, a specialized real-time context engine designed to optimize the performance and reliability of AI agents.

Apache has released a new major version of Apache Axis2/C, a high-performance web services framework. Version 2.0.0 adds HTTP/2, JSON-RPC, Android support, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) for AI assistant integration, while maintaining backward compatibility with legacy SOAP services.

Apple has introduced Xcode 27 with improvements including new APIs for integrating AI models, and extended agentic coding. The announcement was made at Apple's developer conference, WWDC 2026, where Xcode 27 was demonstrated showing how to use it with coding agents. A new DeviceHub for unified simulator and device management was also demonstrated.

The latest general-purpose robot from Genesis AI, Eno, is a wheeled robot with two arms, but instead of legs, it has a three-panel body that allows it to adjust its height and to fold itself into a compact, suitcase-sized footprint that can be easily tucked away when not in use.

A new Pokémon competition has opened on Kaggle in which developers are asked to build AI players that can compete against each other in Pokémon TGC (Trading Card Game) matches.

melonJS is an open-source, lightweight HTML5 game engine designed for building 2D and 2.5D games using JavaScript and TypeScript. The framework offers a Canvas2D-inspired API that simplifies rendering while providing a powerful WebGL backend with automatic fallback capabilities.

ArrowJS has been made open source and has reached version 1.0. Arrow is a reactive UI framework built around JavaScript primitives: modules, functions, and template literals.

Bumblebee is an open-source security tool developed by Perplexity AI to identify software supply chain vulnerabilities on developer workstations.

Book Watch

Written by longtime Rust community members Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols and Chris Krycho, this book is regarded as Rust's bible and shows how to work effectively with Rust’s type system, concurrency model, and tooling, using patterns and idioms chosen for long-term stability. It teaches you to write code that the compiler can verify and that teams can maintain, and systems that can evolve safely over time.Three substantial project chapters focusing on a number-guessing game, a command-line tool, and a multithreaded server demonstrate how the concepts explained work together in complete, real programs.

This book is a step-by-step guide for using Python to transform abstract mathematical concepts into effective, on-the-ground scripts that solve real-world business problems. Blake Rayfield uses practical examples and hands-on exercises to explain how to combine concepts from optimization, probability, statistics, and other branches of mathematics with the Python language to solve difficult, common business problems.

This book tells the stories of 90 programming languages over  76 years, from Konrad Zuse's Plankalkul in 1948 to Gleam in 2024. Each language gets one page: who made it, why, what the code looks like, and what happened next. Dale Biagio also has 28 spotlight narratives that go deeper into the human drama behind the code. Where possible, the entries were reviewed and corrected by the language creators. Entries were verified by the creators of BCPL, SQL, CUDA, Haskell, C++, F#, and Visual Basic.

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