While listening to a podcast about the Go programming language, backend architect Aviv Carmi heard some loose talk about forking the language to keep its original design while also allowing the evolution of an “extended flavor.”
If such a fork takes place, Carmi writes on Medium, he hopes the two languages could interact and share the same runtime environment, libraries, and ecosystem — citing lessons learned from the popularity of other language forks:
There are well-known, hugely successful precedents for such a move. Unarguably, the JVM ecosystem will last longer and keep on gaining popularity thanks to Scala and Kotlin (a decrease in Java’s popularity is overtaken by an increase in Scala’s, during the previous decade, and in Kotlin’s, during this one). All three languages contribute to a stronger, single community and gain stronger libraries and integrations. JavaScript has undoubtedly become stronger thanks to Typescript, which quickly became one of the world’s most popular languages itself. I also believe this is the right move for us Gophers…

Carmi applauds Go’s readability-over-writability culture, its consistent concurrency model (with lightweight threading), and its broad ecosystem of tools. But in a second essay Carmi lists his complaints — about Go’s lack of keyword-based visibility modifiers (like “public” and “private”), how any symbol declared in a file “is automatically visible to the entire package,” and Go’s abundance of global built-in symbols (which complicate the choice of possible variable names, but which can still be overriden, since they aren’t actually keywords). After a longer wishlist — including null-pointer safety features and improvements to error handling — Carmi introduces a third article with “A Proposition for a Better Future.”
I would have loved to see a compile time environment that mostly looks like Go, but allows developers to be a bit more expressive to gain maintainability and runtime safety. But at the same time, allow the Go language itself to largely remain the same and not evolve into something new, as a lot of us Gophers fear. As Gophers, why not have two tools in our tool set?

The essay proposes a new extended flavor of Go called Goat — a “new compile-time environment that will produce standard, compatible, and performant Go files that are fully compatible with any other Go project. This means they can import regular Go files but also be safely imported from any other Go file.”

“Goat implementation will most likely be delivered as a code generation tool or as a transpiler producing regular go files,” explains a page created for the project on GitHub. “However, full implementation details should be designed once the specification provided in this document is finalized.”

Carmi’s essay concludes, “I want to ignite a thorough discussion around the design and specification of Goat…. This project will allow Go to remain simple and efficient while allowing the community to experiment with an extended flavor. Goat spec should be driven by the community and so it needs the opinion and contribution of any Gopher and non-Gopher out there.”

“Come join the discussion, we need your input.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Developer Proposes New (and Compatible) ‘Extended Flavor’ of Go

The mission of NASA’s robotic lander InSight “is nearing an end as dust obscures its solar panels,” reports CNN. “In a matter of weeks, the lander won’t be able to send a beep to show it’s OK anymore.”

“Before it bids farewell, though, the spacecraft still has some surprises in store.”
When Mars rumbled beneath InSight’s feet on December 24, NASA scientists thought it was just another marsquake. The magnitude 4 quake was actually caused by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface a couple thousand miles away. The meteoroid left quite a crater on the red planet, and it revealed glimmering chunks of ice in an entirely unexpected place — near the warm Martian equator.
The chunks of ice — the size of boulders — “were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet,” CNN explained earlier this week. The article also adds that ice below the surface of Mars “could be used for drinking water, rocket propellant and even growing crops and plants by future astronauts. And the fact that the ice was found so near the equator, the warmest region on Mars, might make it an ideal place to land crewed missions to the red planet.”

Interestingly, they note that scientists only realized it was a meteoroid strike (and not an earthquake) when “Before and after photos captured from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since 2006, spotted a new crater this past February.” A crater that was 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep…

When scientists connected the dots from both missions, they realized it was one of the largest meteoroid strikes on Mars since NASA began studying the red planet…. The journal Science published two new studies describing the impact and its effects on Thursday….

“The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust,” said Liliya Posiolova, orbital science operations lead for the orbiter at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, in a statement….

Researchers estimated the meteoroid, the name for a space rock before it hits the ground, was about 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters). While this would have been small enough to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, the same can’t be said for Mars, which has a thin atmosphere only 1% as dense as Earth’s…. Some of the material blasted out of the crater landed as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

Teams at NASA also captured sound from the impact, so you can listen to what it sounds like when a space rock hits Mars. The images captured by the orbiter, along with seismic data recorded by InSight, make the impact one of the largest craters in our solar system ever observed as it was created.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Space Rock Smashed Into Mars’ Equator – and Revealed Chunks of Ice

The animated series “Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi” premiered this week on Disney+, witih all six 15-minute episodes released on Wednesday.

CNN calls it a slick and well-produced “kind of super-service for the Star Wars faithful, rekindling old flames, and comfortably submerging them in the past.” But they also add that animation “has also become a vehicle for greater experimentation, as witnessed in the Star Wars: Visions anime shorts that premiered last year.”

It’s hardly a surprise that this latest addition to the mythology comes courtesy of producer Dave Filoni, who oversaw such series as The Clone Wars and Rebels before throwing his fertile mind for all things Star Wars into The Mandalorian and other live-action fare. Filoni wrote five of the six shorts, which are split between Ahsoka Tano (again voiced by Ashley Eckstein), soon to be featured in her own live-action spinoff; and Count Dooku (played in the movies by Christopher Lee, and voiced by Corey Burton).

Beyond a glimpse of a baby Ahsoka (just in time for holiday gift-giving, kids), in an episode that illustrates her home planet and its warrior streak, the episodes leap around in time. That includes additional insights into Dooku and his abandonment of the Jedi order to embrace the dark side and Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid). The anthology format creates the opportunity to drop in at different inflection points scattered across the “Star Wars” timeline.

“Fans will likely be particularly intrigued by some of the gradations surrounding Ahsoka, her relationship to Anakin Skywalker and the aftermath of the Clone Wars,” the article teases…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New ‘Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi’ Animated Series Begins Streaming on Disney+

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes:

IoT devices are often stitched together from various odd libraries and features. The SANS Internet Storm Center has a story about a cat feeder that not only appears to reach out to Baidu.com every five minutes but also uses a vulnerable DNS library that uses repeating query ids allowing for simple spoofing not seen since the early dark years of DNS

The article, by a SANS.edu dean of research, concludes that “Some networking libraries use ‘baidu.com’ for internet connectivity checks. Even if the DNS lookup succeeds, there is no actual outbound connection in this case. The device is happy as long as an IP address is returned.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Why Is My Cat Using Baidu? And Other IoT DNS Oddities

CNN reports:
Knowing you have higher than normal blood pressure — and taking medications daily to treat it — may be one key to avoiding dementia in later life, a new study found.

Scientists already know that having high blood pressure, particularly between ages 40 and 65, increases the risk of developing dementia in later life, said study coauthor Ruth Peters, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, via email. But she added that research has been less clear on whether lowering blood pressure in older adults would reduce that risk. “What is so exciting about our study is that the data shows that those people who were taking the blood pressure lowering medication had a lower risk of a dementia diagnosis than those taking a matching placebo,” said Peters, who is also a senior research scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia, a nonprofit research organization….

The study, published this week in the European Heart Journal, combined data from five large randomized, double-blinded clinical trials of more than 28,000 older adults with an average age of 69 from 20 countries. All had a history of hypertension. Each of the clinical trials compared people taking blood pressure medications with people taking a matching placebo pill and followed them for an average of 4.3 years.

Pooling the data, Peters and her team found that a drop of about 10 mm/Hg on the systolic and 4 mm/Hg on the diastolic blood pressure readings at 12 months significantly lowered the risk of a dementia diagnosis. In addition, there was a broad linear relationship: As blood pressure dropped, so did cognitive risk, which held true until at least 100 mm/Hg systolic and 70 mm/Hg diastolic, the study said. There was also no sign that blood pressure medications may harm blood flow into the brain at later ages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Study Suggests Blood Pressure Meds May Reduce Risk of Dementia