This Week in News: Meltdown/Spectre Woes, and the Future of JavaScript

We’re rolling into 2018 with many unanswered questions: Will Meltdown and the Spectre CPU flaws turn our highly-tuned cloud-native applications into performance sludge cakes? How many new JavaScript front-end frameworks will we have to learn this year? And what does “immutability” actually mean, anyhow? So many questions.

Fortunately, we have all the answers, in this newest edition of The New Stack Context podcast, our weekly roundup and discussion of the hottest news stories about all matters cloud-native and scalable computing. This week, our regular TNS hosts — editorial director Libby Clark, managing editor Joab Jackson and publisher/founder Alex Williams — are joined by Michelle Gienow, a front-end web developer who writes the Code N00b column for The New Stack and covers programming news for us.

We discuss the fallout from the Meltdown/Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, as well as the present state of JavaScript and if it could become the programming language of choice for cloud-native operations.

LINKS:

Meltdown/Spectre:

• What You Need to Know About the Meltdown and Spectre CPU Flaws
• Linus Torvalds on Meltdown: Perhaps We Should Move to ARM
• Making sense of Meltdown/Spectre (Sysdig/Michael Ducy)
• Vulnerability Note (Cert)
• More details about mitigations for the CPU Speculative Execution issue (Google)

JavaScript in 2018:

• JavaScript 2018: Things You Need To Know, and a Few You Can Skip.
• Making Sense of the JavaScript Ecosystem with Ethan Brown.
• “The JavaScript Ecosystem: Making Sense of the Madness.” (Ethan Brown presentation)
• Creative Software Destruction and the New Presentation Layer.
• How Microsoft’s Brendan Burns is trying to make cloud-native app deployment as easy as coding (GeekWire)

Other News:

• Npm Spam Cleanup Briefly Zaps a Few Legit Software Packages
• IBM Delves into Serverless Function Orchestration with the Open Source Composer Tool
• Get Started with Spinnaker on Kubernetes

Google and Red Hat, mentioned in the podcast, are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature image via Pixabay.