The Plan for the Rust 2021 Edition — It’s been a pretty substantial week for the Rust language, so we’re rolling a handful of features into one here. First up, as featured, is a look at the work underway for the next, third major edition of the language ‘Rust 2021’, but also of interest is:

• Rust for Windows 0.9 — Microsoft is just one of a handful of companies pushing Rust within its ecosystem and now you can call any Windows API 'past, present, and future' from the language.
• AWS has unveiled a new AWS SDK for Rust in alpha.
• Rust 1.52.1 has been released.

Rust Language Working Group

All-In-One Codified Cloud Security — Simplify your DevSecOps toolchain with Bridgecrew. Our platform leverages automation to embed security throughout the entire development lifecycle. Try Bridgecrew for free.

Bridgecrew sponsor

Google Docs Shifting to Canvas Based Rendering — I think this could be a more substantial long term move than it appears at first as it’s a whole new way to approach rendering content in the browser (and one more commonly associated with games and graphics, so far). They’ve rigged up this demo of the approach. The Hacker News discussion is arguably more interesting than the news itself.

Google

Migrating from Python to Kotlin for Doordash's Backend Services — Certainly not one of the more common language migrations you ever hear about.

Matt Anger (Doordash)

The History of RSpec — RSpec is a very long standing Behavior Driven Development system for doing testing in Ruby but its influence has spread significantly beyond that.

Steven R. Baker

The libcurl Transfer State Machine — Being such a heavily used tool, it’s interesting to see how curl operations are structured behind the scenes.

Daniel Stenberg

How We Cut Cost on 55% of Our Storage Without Deleting a Single File? — We understood that NOT all files should be treated equally. Read the full story.

Wix Engineering sponsor

You Might As Well Timestamp It — This is entirely one developer’s opinion, but I’ve gotta say, I’m (mostly) convinced. Jerod argues that rather than storing booleans, why not store timestamps? Rather than knowing merely if a user is active or not, isn’t it better to know when they became active?

Jerod Santo

The Best Supported Serverless Languages — A tally of the supported languages on several serverless platforms. While some platforms now allow arbitrary languages or even Docker images, it’s nice to see which platforms boast native support.

Dylan Anthony

How the New York Times Manages Readers’ Data Privacy — At the scale the New York Times operates, big problems often require big solutions (their paywall system allegedly cost $40 million on its own) and so they built a system to allow a single team to implement data privacy changes across a suite of 70 products.

Kelsey Johnson (NY Times)

Pyston 2.2: Python 3.8, But Faster — Last week we linked to Cinder, Instagram’s performance oriented fork of CPython 3.8. Pyston is a similar project originally from Dropbox and boasts being 30% faster than ‘stock Python’ on its benchmarks.

The Pyston Blog

DazedAndConfused: A Tool to Determine 'Dependency Confusion' Exposure — Scans dependency manifests on projects (e.g. Ruby’s gemfile.lock, npm’s package-lock.json) and finds potential public vs private source confusions.

Salesforce

Observability Won’t Replace Monitoring (Because It Shouldn’t)

Lightstep sponsor

WebAssembly Cloud: Play with Rust + WebAssembly in Your Browser — A simple, experimental tool to let you play around with both Rust and WebAssembly in the browser without installing a thing.

Richard Anaya

Google Dataset Search: A Search Engine for Datasets — A handy way to dig around for just the right data you need or, perhaps, to find a dataset upon which to test your data processing skills (of course, not every dataset is open licensed, so check that if relevant).

Google

Using 'Computer Modern' on the Web — If you’ve ever read or even written an academic paper, you may have encountered the TeX typesetting system and its distinctive associated fonts. Here they’ve been packaged up in a form that you can easily use them on your site. Be warned, though, Hacker News commenters are not fans ;-)

Christian Perfect

Can I Email..? Support Tables for HTML and CSS in Emails — It’s like Can I Use but for email clients and their varying levels of HTML and CSS support. We first linked this about 18 months ago but it’s had a bunch of updates recently.

HTeuMeuLeu

An eBPF Implementation That Runs on Top of Windows — And it’s from Microsoft no less. Windows continues on its slow trajectory towards Linux :-)

Microsoft