Today the Go team is thrilled to release Go 1.18, which you can get by visiting the download page.

Go 1.18 is a massive release that includes new features, performance improvements, and our biggest change ever to the language. It isn’t a stretch to say that the design for parts of Go 1.18 started over a decade ago when we first released Go.

Also: Go 1.18 Release Notes - The Go Programming Language

• Darpa, Linux Foundation create open software initiative to accelerate US 5G stack

  The Linux Foundation said it entered a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to create open source software. Darpa and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella that allows US government projects, their ecosystem and the open-source community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, edge, AI, standards, programmability and IoT, among other technologies.

• Linux Foundation, DARPA collaborate on open source for 5G | FierceWireless

  The Linux Foundation has signed an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to establish an open source project for the U.S. government.

  The agreement calls for the Linux Foundation and DARPA to work together in the areas of 5G, edge, artificial intelligence, standards, programmability and IoT, among other technologies.

• DARPA, Linux Foundation Partner to Advance 5G - Nextgov

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is partnering with a major technology consortium to establish an open-source software development collaboration ecosystem to advance emerging technologies such as 5G, according to a Wednesday press release.

  The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that hosts open-source efforts including Kubernetes and the O-RAN Alliance’s software community, signed a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, with DARPA to create a “broad collaboration umbrella” called US Government Open Programmable and Secure, or US GOV OPS. DARPA’s Open Programmable Secure 5G, or OPS-5G, effort will be the first project included under the umbrella, according to the release.

• DARPA, Linux Foundation team for government 5G | Light Reading

  The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it has signed a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.

  Under the agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella (US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IOT among other technologies. The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.

I’ve been considering moving my blog back to a FreeBSD web server. I’d hosted it that way for years and recently switched it to a Linux machine so I could make Octopress work properly. It uses some old, outdated Ruby gems, and it just seemed easier.

But with a new redesign coming and a new Hugo back-end, I’ll be bringing my hosting machine back to FreeBSD.

I recently read FreeBSD is an amazing operating system, which got me thinking:

Can FreeBSD be a viable desktop operating system for developers in 2020?

• Building and testing on multiple platforms – introducing minicoin

  While working with large-scale (thousands of hosts), distributed (globally) systems, one of my favourite, albeit somewhat gruesome, metaphors was that of “servers as cattle” vs “servers as pets”. Pet-servers are those we groom manually, we keep them alive, and we give them nice names by which to remember and call (ie ssh into) them. However, once you are dealing with hundreds of machines, manually managing their configuration is no longer an option. And once you have thousands of machines, something will break all the time, and you need to be able to provision new machines quickly, and automatically, without having to manually follow a list of complicated instructions.

  When working with such systems, we use configuration management systems such as CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, or Ansible, to automate the provisioning and configuration of machines. When working in the cloud, the entire machine definition becomes “infrastructure as code”. With these tools, servers become cattle which – so the rather unvegetarian idea – is simply “taken behind the barn and shot” when it doesn’t behave like it should. We can simply bring a new machine, or an entire environment, up by running the code that defines it. We can use the same code to bring production, development, and testing environments up, and we can look at the code to see exactly what the differences between those environments are. The tooling in this space is fairly complex, but even so there is little focus on developers writing native code targeting multiple platforms.

  For us as developers, the machine we write our code on is most likely a pet. Our primary workstation dying is the stuff for nightmares, and setting up a new machine will probably keep us busy for many days. But this amount of love and care is perhaps not required for those machines that we only need for checking whether our code builds and runs correctly. We don’t need our test machines to be around for a long time, and we want to know exactly how they are set up so that we can compare things. Applying the concepts from cloud computing and systems engineering to this problem lead me (back) to Vagrant, which is a popular tool to manage virtual machines locally and to share development environments.

• GNU Gengetopt - News: 2.23 released

  New version (2.23) was released. Main changes were in build system, so please report any issues you notice.

• Abolishing SyntaxError: invalid syntax ...

  Do you remember when you first started programming (possibly with Python) and encountered an error message that completely baffled you? For some reason, perhaps because you were required to complete a formal course or because you were naturally persistent, you didn't let such messages discourage you entirely and you persevered. And now, whenever you see such cryptic error messages, you can almost immediately decipher them and figure out what causes them and fix the problem.

• Sending email with EZGmail and Python

• Creating and Importing Modules in Python