ZuriHac 2018: Haskell hackathon in Rapperswil

Google Open Source recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Ivan Krišto from Google’s Zürich office talks more about the event below.

Over the weekend of June 9th, Rapperswil, Switzerland became a home for 300 Haskellers. Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil hosted the seventh annual ZuriHac, the biggest Haskell Hackathon in Europe. ZuriHac is a free, international coding festival with the goal to expand our community and to build and improve Haskell libraries, tools and infrastructure.

Participants could choose to hack all day long, attend the Haskell beginners course led by Julie Moronuki, join the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) DevOps track organized by GHC contributors with the goal to bring in new contributors, listen to the Haskell flavoured talks, or socialize and swim in the lake. The event was colocated with C++ standardization committee meetings which offered a unique opportunity for sharing ideas between the two communities.

Here is a short summary of featured talks at ZuriHac.

• Niki Vazou presented Liquid Haskell: Refinement Types for Haskell, a way to enforce critical properties of functions at the type level at compile time. 
• Stephen Diehl talked about the state of LLVM bindings for Haskell in Building compilers with llvm-hs. 
• Edward Kmett presented ideas for improving the Haskell combinators: Combinators Revisited. 
• Gabriel Gonzalez presented an approach to parallelize finite state machines and how to deal with their performance bottlenecks in Fast and parallel state machines. 
• Joachim Breitner gave an overview of state-of-the-art inspection testing: A promise checked is a promise kept: Inspection Testing.
• Manuel Chakravarty talked about GHC's development process: Continuous Integration & Testing for GHC.

The event concluded with a presentation of the results of the three day hackathon: project presentations.

Video by Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil.

Once again, we broke the attendance record! We’re already preparing for ZuriHac 2019 and hope to keep up this amazing growth. See you next year!

By Ivan Krišto, Software Engineer

Congratulations to the latest Google Open Source Peer Bonus winners

We are pleased to announce the latest round of Google Open Source Peer Bonus winners and the projects they support.

Open source software is a cornerstone of software development inside and outside of Google, and the Google Open Source Peer Bonus program is one way we thank the people who make our work possible. Twice a year we invite Googlers to nominate external contributors to be rewarded for their contribution to open source projects.

This time we have a truly international team of recipients from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, France, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden, UK and USA. You can learn about previous recipients in these blog posts.

Projects range from Linux distributions and version control systems to monitoring and testing software. Some are part of the backbone of our industry, others are critical dependencies of specific products and services we offer. All of them are important to us!

Listed below are the individuals who gave us permission to thank them publicly:

Name	Project	Name	Project
Sultan Alsawaf	Android Kernel	Ravi Santosh Gudimetla	Kubernetes
Allan McRae	Arch Linux	Steve Kuznetsov	Kubernetes
Seth Pollack	aws-encryption-provider	Hisham Muhammad	LuaRocks
George Gensure	Bazel Buildfarm	Yutaka Matsubara	meinheld
Omar Cornut	Dear ImGui	Pulkit Goyal	Mercurial
Alessandro Arzilli	Delve	Yuya Nishihara	Mercurial
Matt Klein	Envoy	Adam Mummery-Smith	Mixin
Ivan Grokhotkov	ESP8266 core for Arduino	Arnout Engelen	Notion
Esther Onfroy	Exodus Privacy	Brian Brazil	Prometheus
Yao Li	Forklift	Bruno Oliveira	pytest
Warner Losh	FreeBSD	James Friedman	RMWC
Elijah Newren	Git	Steve Klabnik	Rust Book
Gábor Szeder	Git	Jack Lukic	Semantic UI
Alvaro Viebrantz	google-cloud-iot-arduino	Vidar Holen	ShellCheck
Richard Musiol	GopherJS, go-wasm	Ivan Popelyshev	Skia graphics in Chrome
Tobias Furuholm	Grafeas	Spencer Gibb	Spring Cloud
David Pursehouse	JGit	Daniel Alm	Swift gRPC
Brian Granger	Jupyter	Yong Tang	TensorFlow
Rodrigo Menezes	kops	Jason Zaman	TensorFlow, Gentoo, SELinux
Rohith Jayawardene	kops	Kai Sasaki	TensorFlow.js
Kam Kasravi	Kubeflow	Manraj Grover	TensorFlow.js
Pete MacKinnon	Kubeflow	Stefan Weil	Tesseract
Christoph Blecker	Kubernetes	Sumana Harihareswara	Warehouse (PyPI)
Davanum Srinivas	Kubernetes	Jia Li	zone.js

Once again we would like to express our gratitude and appreciation to current and former recipients for their hard work, time and devotion to open source. Without you these projects wouldn’t thrive!

We look forward to your ongoing contributions and can’t wait to recognize even more contributors for their work in 2019.

By Maria Tabak, Google Open Source

How we brought the latest version of Python to App Engine and Cloud Functions

At Cloud Next 2018, we added Python 3.7 support to Cloud Functions and now we’ve announced Python 3.7 support for the App Engine standard environment. These new runtimes allow you to write Python functions and apps using the latest version of Python and the rich ecosystem of packages available on Python Packaging Index (PyPI).

This new runtime marks a significant update to App Engine and was enabled by new open source software that we recently released: gVisor and FTL.

Python, straight from the source

Running Python 3.7 on App Engine and Cloud Functions required us to fundamentally rethink our infrastructure. Traditionally, meeting Google Cloud’s security requirements meant that we had to run a modified version of the Python interpreter. However, using a modified interpreter constrained some language features and only allowed us to support a limited set of whitelisted Python libraries.

Thanks to gVisor, a container sandbox that provides improved security and process isolation, we can now run the unmodified Python 3.7.0 interpreter. We’ve done extensive testing to make sure Python 3.7 is compatible with gVisor. As part of our compatibility testing, we run Python’s full suite of language tests, and tests for Python packages that are popular on PyPI. We’re committed to ensuring that everything you’ve come to know and love about Python is supported on our platform.

Seamless deployments

Most importantly, this change in our infrastructure makes it easier to take advantage of Python’s vast ecosystem. As a developer, you just add project dependencies to a requirements.txt file and deploy.

During deployment, FTL, a tool for building containers, fetches dependencies listed in your requirements.txt file and installs them alongside your app or function. FTL also includes a short-lived dependency cache, which speeds up repeated deployments if no changes are detected in your requirements.txt file. This is particularly useful if you find just need to re-deploy because you found a typo.

Keeping up with the Pythonistas

In making these changes, we also decided to expand the list of system packages that are included with each runtime’s Ubuntu 18.04 distribution. We think that will make life just a little bit easier for developers working with the latest release of Python.

Looking forward, we’re excited about how these changes will allow us to keep up with the Python community’s progress as they release new versions and libraries. Please let us know what you think and if you run into any challenges.

You can learn more about how to get started with it on App Engine and Cloud Functions in our documentation. We can’t wait to see what you build with Python 3.7.

By Stewart Reichling, Product Manager