Dev News: Rust-Based Slint Matures and Shopify Cleans up
Slint version 1.0 was released on Monday, making the new Rust-based toolkit ready for production, according to the build team.
Slint can be used to develop UIs for various operating systems and processor architectures, including Linux, macOS, Windows, WebAssembly, Blackberry QNX, and bare metal. It allows JavaScript developers to create native interfaces for embedded and desktop applications. The tool is written in Rust but that is obscured, allowing developers to interact with JavaScript, Rust or C++ libraries to build the UI interface, Olivier Goffart, a co-founder of SixtyFPS GmbH, told The New Stack in March.
“This is a major milestone, the result of three years of work by 50 contributors. Compared to the previous release, version 1.0 introduces only minor API cleanups and bug fixes,” stated a team blog post announcing the new release. ”The 1.x series signifies that Slint has now graduated out from ‘development mode’ and is ready to be used in production projects.”
Slint is built from the ground up with scalability, inclusivity, toolability, and cross-platform compatibility in mind, the team stated. Among the tooling is the ability to speed up the UI development process. Slint comes with support for code completion, navigation, refactoring, and syntax highlighting.
Shopify Cleans up Its Garbage Collection
Shopify’s engineering blog shared how their Ruby infrastructure team is working to reduce the latency of Ruby’s garbage collector in Shopify’s monolith. Ruby developer Jean Boussier shared the changes that worked, while acknowledging there were dead ends in the process and that more work remains.
“The key thing to understand here is that when the Ruby garbage collector runs, all other execution is paused,” Bossier wrote Thursday. “So when the garbage collector decides that it needs to do some work, it typically does so during the life of a request. This garbage collection work results in increased latencies for client requests, causing merchants and buyers to wait longer than they otherwise would for an answer.”
Boussier included a graph showing the distribution of time spent in garbage collection for requests that have GC information logged, which are 1% of all requests. The median request spent 3ms doing some form of garbage collection work. Some requests even spent multiple seconds doing GC work. It explains in detail why this happens and how the team tweaked the system to improve latency.
API-Access Waitlist Available for Google’s AI Claude
Anthropic, the Google-backed AI foundation model company, is granting API access to Claude, its ChatGPT competitor, the AI Exchange reported Thursday. Developers who want to gain access can join the waitlist.
Anthropic also made available an add-on to Slack that will allow users to access Claude via the communication tool. Claude is also used to power Notion AI, which is a popular platform for developers.
Meanwhile, in an exclusive published today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google CEO Sundar Pichai plans to add conversational AI features to its market-leading Chrome search engine.
SvelteHack Offers a $3000 Award for Coolest Svelte Use
Finally for this week, developers working on a Svelte project might want to checkout the SvelteHack, which started in February and ends Monday, April 17. It includes a category for the coolest use of Svelte, with a prize of $3,000, plus there are competitions for best library and best ecosystem integration, as well as second, third, fourth and fifth place awards in all categories.
Svelte practitioners might also want to sign up for Svelte Summit, a May 6 virtual conference. The conference is still seeking speakers and presenters as well.
In other Svelte news, Dominic Gannaway has joined Vercel to work on Svelte full-time, according to a Svelte blog post. Gannaway created the Inferno UI framework or Lexical, Meta’s WYSIWYG.
