GIMP 3.0 Enters String Freeze, Inching Closer To Release

Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GIMP-3.0-String-Freeze

VirtualBox 7.1 Beta 2 Released For This Big Oracle Virtualization Update

Released last month was the VirtualBox 7.1 Beta 1 virtualization software release from Oracle. This new version is bringing a modernized GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing, and other improvements. Released yesterday was the second beta of this big VirtualBox update...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/VirtualBox-7.1-Beta-2

SVT-AV1 2.2 Delivers More Performance Improvements

SVT-AV1 2.2 is now available for this leading open-source AV1 video encoder. With this new version comes yet more performance optimizations...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SVT-AV1-2.2-Released

Zed Code Editor Begins Adding AI Features Powered By Anthropic's Claude

Zed, the code/text editor being developed by former Atom editor developers, has continued to gain interest among developers since going open-source, being written in the Rust programming language, and native Linux builds taking shape. The latest feature work on Zed is beginning to integrate AI-powered functionality by leveraging Anthropic's Claude LLM...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zed-Adding-AI-Features

Jasper Van der Jeugt: Turnstyle

I am delighted and horrified to announce a new graphical programming language called Turnstyle. You can see an example below (click to run).

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In the time leading up to ZuriHac 2024 earlier this year, I had been thinking about Piet a little. We ended up working on something else during the Hackathon, but this was still in the back of my mind.

Some parts of Piets design are utter genius (using areas for number literals, using hue/lightness as cycles). There are also things I don’t like, such as the limited amount of colors, the difficulty reusing code, and the lack of a way to extend it with new primitive operations. I suspect these are part of the reason nobody has yet tried to write, say, an RDBMS or a web browser in Piet.

Given the amount of attention going to programming languages in the functional programming community, I was quite surprised nobody had ever tried to do a functional variant of it (as far as I could find).

I wanted to create something based on Lambda Calculus. It forms a nice basis for a minimal specification, and I knew that while code would still be somewhat frustrating to write, there is the comforting thought of being able to reuse almost everything once it’s written.Cheatsheet for the specification

After playing around with different designs this is what I landed on. The guiding principle was to search for a specification that was as simple as possible, while still covering lambda calculus extended with primitives that, you know, allow you to interact with computers.

One interesting aspect that I discovered (not invented) is that it’s actually somewhat more expressive than Lambda Calculus, since you can build Abstract Syntax Graphs (rather than just Trees). This is illustrated in the loop example above, which recurses without the need for a fixed-point combinator.

For the full specification and more examples take a look at the Turnstyle website and feel free to play around with the sources on GitHub.

http://jaspervdj.be/posts/2024-08-21-turnstyle.html

Linux Support Emerging For The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge X1 Elite Laptop

Following all of the Snapdragon X1 upstream enablement work over the past number of months by Qualcomm and then DeviceTree additions emerging for enabling the likes of the ASUS Vivobook S 15, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, and Microsoft Surface 7, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is the newest Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop seeing Linux DT support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Samsung-Galaxy-Book4-Edge-Linux