As 2024 comes to a close, SD Times is looking back at the top software development news stories of the year across the industry. Here are 10 of what we believe to be the biggest stories we covered throughout the year:
Microsoft releases .NET 9
.NET 9 was released in November, adding a number of performance improvements and new functionality to support developers building with AI.
According to Microsoft, this release featured more than 1,000 performance updates, one of which was that the Server GC was altered to adapt to application memory requirements instead of the resources available in the environment. This change resulted in a 15% increase in requests per second compared to .NET 8 and a 93% reduction in memory usage, Microsoft claimed.
.NET capabilities were also expanded for building AI into applications. For this release, Microsoft collaborated with Semantic Kernel to provide a set of C# abstractions for the .NET ecosystem for interacting with AI services. This will make it easier for developers to integrate these services into their applications.
For GitHub Copilot users, a number of new features were added to the .NET experience, including smart variable inspection, an IEnumerable visualizer, issue resolution assistance, better AI completions for C#, and help with debugging tests.
OSI releases its definition for Open Source AI
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) released its open source AI definition version 1.0 in October to clarify what constitutes open source AI. The intent was to give the industry a standard by which to validate whether or not an AI system can be deemed Open Source AI.
The definition covers code, model, and data information, with the latter being a contentious point due to legal and practical concerns.
Since its publication, the definition has seen criticism by some in the industry, due to the fact that it doesn’t “require reproducibility by the public of the scientific process of building these systems, because the OSAID fails to place sufficient requirements on the licensing and public disclosure of training sets for so-called ‘Open Source’ systems,” Bradley Kuhn, a policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy wrote in a post.
Anthropic releases updated version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and first release of Claude 3.5 Haiku
In October, Anthropic had a number of updates to share about its AI models, including an updated version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the release of Claude 3.5 Haiku, and a public beta for a capability that enables users to instruct Claude to use computers as a human would.
The new version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet featured improvements across the board compared to the original version. It outperforms the original in graduate level reasoning, undergraduate level knowledge, code, math problem solving, high school math competition, visual question answering, agentic coding, and agentic tool use.
“Early customer feedback suggests the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet represents a significant leap for AI-powered coding,” Anthropic wrote in a post. The company also revealed that GitLab tested the model for DevSecOps tasks and found up to a 10% improvement in reasoning across different use cases.
Claude 3.5 Haiku is the company’s fastest model, and has a similar cost and speed compared to Claude 3 Haiku, but improves across every skill set, even outperforming the previous generation’s largest model, Claude 3 Opus, in many benchmarks.
According to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Haiku does especially well in coding tasks, scoring 40.6 on SWE-bench, which is a benchmark that evaluates how well a model can reason through GitHub issues. This is better than the original Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o, the company claims.
PostgreSQL 17 adds performance gains, storage optimizations and more
In September, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced the release of PostgreSQL 17, the newest version of the open source database.
According to the group’s announcement, PostgreSQL 17 improved performance and scalability while adapting to new data access and storage patterns required by cloud native computing and the rise of AI.
Among the key new features is enhanced support for JSON, which was one of the reasons users began adopting the database. In this release, the implementation of the SQL/JSON standard is mostly complete, according to Tom Kincaid, SVP of Database Server Development at EDB, a major contributor to the project. “I think one of the things people ask for the most is the implementation of JSON_TABLE, which enables you to take a JSON document and make a view of it as a relational table… it really speaks to the extensibility of Postgres, but also the continued evolution towards making it easier to adopt,” he said.
Other key features include incremental backup, more features to MERGE, and support for SQL/JSON constructors and query functions.
Swift 6 now available with strict concurrency checking
Swift 6, released in September, is a major release of the programming language and expands it to more platforms and domains beyond just Apple operating systems, which is what it was originally designed for.
It now offers strict concurrency checking, which helps developers find data races at compile time, which could lead to an app crashing, misbehaving, or corrupting user data. According to Apple, data races can be difficult to reproduce or debug because of the fact that they rely on the order of concurrent operations, and being able to check for them at compile time will enable developers to ensure they’re not present in an app.
“Swift 6 marks the start of the journey to make data-race safety dramatically easier. The usability of data-race safety remains an area of active development, and your feedback will help shape future improvements,” the Swift development team wrote in a post.
Another benefit of this release is expanded platform support across new Linux distributions and Windows architectures, as well as better interoperability with C++.
NIST approves three cryptographic algorithms capable of withstanding quantum computers
In August, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced approval of three post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, which will be able to safeguard data even in the event that quantum computing advances to the point that today’s cryptography can be broken.
“The official publication of these algorithms marks a crucial milestone to advancing the protection of the world’s encrypted data from cyberattacks that could be attempted through the unique power of quantum computers, which are rapidly progressing to cryptographic relevancy. This is the point at which quantum computers will harness enough computational power to break the encryption standards underlying most of the world’s data and infrastructure today,” IBM, who developed two of these new standards, wrote in a statement.
These new algorithms are part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) program, and the news came eight years after NIST first announced a call for proposals asking for standards and strategies for securing information in a quantum world.
NIST is also still evaluating two other sets of algorithms, and at the time of the announcement, stated that it planned to select one or two of them by the end of the year, which had not yet happened at the time of writing. The first set contains algorithms with a different type of math problems than the selected one, and the second set contains algorithms that are designed for digital signatures.
In addition, NIST expects to announce 15 more algorithms that it received during a second call for proposals in 2022.
.NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code now generally available
Microsoft announced the general availability of the .NET MAUI extension for Visual Studio Code in June, allowing developers to build cross-platform apps using .NET MAUI within their editor. Microsoft created .NET MAUI in 2022 to be a replacement for Xamarin, which reached end-of-life in May of this year.
A number of new features were also announced, including an improved editing experience with XAML. When it was in preview, the extension only had basic syntax highlighting and completions, but it’s since been updated to work with Copilot and take advantage of intelligent autocompletion, tooltips, and easy code navigation.
With this release, Hot Reload was also made available for both XAML and C# files. This highly awaited feature allows developers to make changes while an app is running and see those changes reflected automatically, without needing to restart the app.
OpenAI launches its newest model GPT-4o
In May, OpenAI rolled out GPT-4o, its newest flagship model that is faster than GPT-4 yet maintains the same level of intelligence and builds on its voice, vision and text capabilities, according to the organization’s announcement.
The new model takes understanding of images to a higher level. In its announcement, OpenAI gave this example: “You can now take a picture of a menu in a different language and talk to GPT-4o to translate it, learn about the food’s history and significance, and get recommendations.”
At the time, OpenAI noted that future features will improve its natural language, real-time voice conversations, and will add functionality to enable ChatGPT conversations over real-time video, enabling ChatGPT to “see” a live sporting event and letting the user ask questions about the rules of the sport.
GitHub Copilot Workspace provides developers a full step-by-step plan for creating features, applications
GitHub released a technical preview in April for a new Copilot-based platform designed to help out across all steps of the development life cycle, from planning to building to testing.
“Copilot Workspace represents a radically new way of building software with natural language, and is expressly designed to deliver–not replace–developer creativity, faster and easier than ever before. With Copilot Workspace we will empower more experienced developers to operate as systems thinkers, and materially lower the barrier of entry for who can build software,” GitHub wrote in a blog post.
GitHub Copilot Workspace leverages a task-centric experience for starting big projects, tackling feature requests, or resolving bug reports. It comes up with a step-by-step list of what tasks developers need to complete to achieve their goals.
The process can be started from a GitHub repository or a GitHub Issue, and it creates the plan based on its understanding of the codebase, existing issue replies, and more, GitHub explained.
IBM to acquire HashiCorp for $6.4 billion
IBM announced in April its intention to acquire HashiCorp in a huge $6.4 billion acquisition that at the time was expected to close later this year, but now is likely to not close until early 2025.
IBM says that the goal with this acquisition is to create “a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud platform.”
HashiCorp’s portfolio includes a number of popular tools, including Terraform for infrastructure as code provisioning, Vault for secrets management, Consul for service-based networking, and more.
Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp, said: “IBM’s leadership in hybrid cloud along with its rich history of innovation, make it the ideal home for HashiCorp as we enter the next phase of our growth journey. I’m proud of the work we’ve done as a standalone company, I am excited to be able to help our customers further, and I look forward to the future of HashiCorp as part of IBM.”