Weekly recap

Spiria Tech Recap - № 374 - New code search on GitHub, sudo in Rust, AI asistant in Android Studio, etc.

By Laurent Gloaguen,

May 12, 2023.

GitHub’s big code search overhaul

GitHub announced a complete overhaul of its code search tool, a project that has been in development for several years. The company says its new search is “about twice as fast” as the older system and “understands the code, prioritizing the most relevant results.” The search function, with its completely redesigned interface, suggests terms and it categorizes and formats results in a smarter way. The tool also supports substring queries, regular expressions, and symbol searching. You can target your search to either an organization’s codebase or to a specific code repository. If you want to explore the tool more thoroughly, GitHub has published a query syntax guide.

⇨ Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy, “After 18 months, GitHub’s big code search overhaul is generally available.”

2023-05-08

Sudo and su get the Rust treatment

Sudo make me a sandwich. © iStock.

Two essential utilities in the command-line interfaces of Unix-like systems are undergoing some rewriting in the modern Rust language. This rewrite is part of a larger effort to replace important but aging functions with memory-safe equivalents. Sudo lets a user execute one-off actions using someone else’s privileges (usually the root superuser), whereas su enables user-account switching during a session. Sudo was developed in C in the 1980s at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It has experienced numerous vulnerabilities related to memory security issues (buffer overflow bug). The rewrite is led by Prossimo, a group whose main goal is “to move the Internet’s security-sensitive software infrastructure to memory safe code. Many of the most critical software vulnerabilities are memory safety issues in C and C++ code.” You can follow their work on GitHub. However, it’s difficult to say when you might see these renovated tools land in your favorite Linux distribution.

⇨ Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy, “Two core Unix-like utilities, sudo and su, are getting rewrites in Rust.”

2023-05-01

Android Studio’s AI assistant

At its I/O conference, Google announced Studio Bot, an AI assistant that helps Android developers write and debug code. Studio Bot is just starting out and is currently available only to developers in the US via the Canary channel. It is built on Codey, a new generative AI model specialized in programming, and on a new version of the Pathways Language Model (PaLM). In its documentation, Google warns that “Studio Bot is still an early experiment, and might sometimes provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently. Studio Bot might give you working code that doesn't produce the expected output, or provide you with code that is not optimal or incomplete.” The tool is part of Android Studio, which is Google’s official integrated development environment (IDE) for Android developers. Studio Bot feels a lot like ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Bard (Google), in that it offers a “conversational experience” that acts as a kind of advisor.

Google also announced that it will shortly launch a more multipurpose code-generation tool compatible with JavaScript, Java, Python, SQL and Go. It will also be based on Codey and it will be similar to Copilot (OpenAI and GitHub).

⇨ YouTube, “Meet Studio Bot - the AI powered coding assistant in Android Studio”

⇨ Ars Technica, Samuel Axon, “Google jumps into the AI coding assistant fray with Codey and Studio Bot.”

2023-05-10

Chromium puts a lock on the little padlock

A padlock icon shows up next to the URL in all current browsers when a website loads via HTTPS, indicating that the connection between the browser and the website is secure and that an eavesdropper can’t sneak in or switch it. The icon first appeared in Netscape browsers in the 1990s, when HTTPS was still a novelty. In 2013, only 14% of Alexa’s Top 1M sites supported HTTPS, whereas now, it’s the norm rather than the exception. Over 95% of page downloads in Windows Chrome use an HTTPS secure connection. But most people don’t have a clue what this padlock icon actually means, according to the Chromium browser-engine team. It’s therefore resorting to drastic measures by cutting the padlock icon starting with Chrome 117, whose release is in September. Of course, Chrome will keep alerting users when a site doesn’t use HTTPS, says the Chrome team. This change is notable because of the current dominance of the Chromium engine (nearly 80% of pages loaded on the web), which means that the changes made by Google tend to become the norm for browsers using another engine, starting with Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Gecko.

⇨ Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy, “Google will retire Chrome’s HTTPS padlock icon because no one knows what it means.”

2023-05-03

Microsoft freezes wages

Even with strong financial results, Microsoft is tightly controlling payroll costs. The company does not plan any raises for its employees this year. In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees that only hourly workers would receive raises, a move he attributes to economic uncertainty. “We are clear that we are helping drive a major platform shift in this new era of AI, and doing so in a dynamic, competitive environment while also facing global macroeconomic uncertainties,” he writes. “We must maintain a leadership position in our at-scale businesses of today, generating enough yield to invest and lead in the next wave, while staying on the frontiers of both performance and efficiency.” Nadella pointed out that the management team will also not be getting any salary increase and will receive lower annual bonuses. Microsoft already announced layoffs of 10,000 people or 4.5% of its global workforce at the beginning of the year.

⇨ The Verge, Emma Roth, “Microsoft won’t give salaried employees raises this year.”

2023-05-11