Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Netflix Ditches Kafka and Cassandra for In-Memory Database on Tudum

2025-08-19

Netflix's fan website, Tudum, initially used a CQRS architecture with Kafka and Cassandra, but suffered from delays in previewing content updates. To address this, the Netflix team replaced Kafka and Cassandra with RAW Hollow, an internally developed in-memory object store. RAW Hollow's in-memory dataset dramatically improved content preview and page rendering speeds, offering a better experience for both editors and visitors.

(www.infoq.com)

Tech

Stop Thinking About Parallel Programming: Just Do It (Transparently)!

2025-06-25

Guy L. Steele Jr. argues that programmers shouldn't need to worry about the specifics of parallel programming. Languages should provide transparent ways to run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach to language design, supporting algorithms based on independence and divide-and-conquer principles, rather than linear problem decomposition. His presentation was given at the Strange Loop conference.

(www.infoq.com)

Development parallel programming

Void IDE: An Open-Source, Privacy-Focused AI Code Editor

2025-06-22

Void IDE, a new open-source AI-powered code editor in beta, offers a privacy-focused and free alternative to proprietary options like Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Backed by Y Combinator and forking Visual Studio Code, Void IDE lets users choose local processing or direct API calls to LLMs such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini, mitigating privacy concerns and subscription costs. It boasts features like inline code editing, AI chat, and code generation, mirroring similar tools while prioritizing user data control. The project has generated significant interest on Hacker News and Reddit, sparking discussions about its open-source nature and the increasing number of VS Code forks.

(www.infoq.com)

Development

Apple's Password Monitoring Service Gets a 40% Performance Boost with Swift Rewrite

2025-06-15

Apple migrated its global Password Monitoring service from Java to Swift, resulting in a 40% throughput increase and a significant reduction in memory usage—freeing up nearly 50% of Kubernetes capacity. The switch addressed performance bottlenecks stemming from Java's garbage collection and high memory footprint. Swift's deterministic memory management and faster startup times drastically improved scalability and responsiveness. Handling billions of daily requests with stringent latency requirements, the service benefited greatly from Swift's performance. This migration reflects a broader industry trend toward performance-oriented languages for extreme-scale services.

(www.infoq.com)

Tech

NATS Near-Exit from CNCF Sparks Debate on Open Source Sustainability

2025-05-29

Synadia, the company behind the open-source messaging system NATS, briefly threatened to remove it from the CNCF and switch to a non-open-source license, raising concerns about the long-term viability of open-source projects. While a last-minute agreement saw Synadia transfer the trademark to the Linux Foundation and keep NATS open source, the incident highlighted tensions between open-source foundations and contributing companies. The dispute revealed vulnerabilities in the current framework, underscoring the need for clearer asset management and stronger safeguards to protect open-source projects from similar future threats. The controversy also sparked discussions about the role of foundations in maintaining the stability and trust within the open-source community.

(www.infoq.com)

Development

Amazon Prime Video Rebuilds Living Room UI with Rust and WebAssembly

2025-04-12

Amazon engineers detail their journey rebuilding the Prime Video living room device UI using Rust and WebAssembly. Facing challenges like massive performance variations across devices (set-top boxes, game consoles, etc.), inconsistent hardware capabilities, and difficult native code updates, they employed a hybrid architecture: a low-level UI engine in Rust and WebAssembly, with business logic in React and JavaScript communicating via a message bus. To further boost performance and responsiveness, they fully migrated the UI layer to Rust, creating a new Rust UI SDK. The new architecture dramatically reduced input latency and enabled previously impossible animation effects. While the WebAssembly ecosystem remains evolving, presenting challenges like panic handling, the overall results were positive, with increased developer productivity.

(www.infoq.com)

Development