Release Radar · January 2024 Edition

The new year has kicked off, and developers are hard at work. We hope all our open source community members had a lovely holiday break, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you ship this year. 2024 is already off to a great start with open source projects releasing major updates. There’s everything here from weekend projects to world changing technology. Let’s take a look at our staff picks for this month’s Release Radar.

HistoJS 1.0

From one of the great minds behind BrainChop, comes HistoJS. Following the medical trend, HistoJS is an interactive tool designed to analyse spatial-molecular patterns on highly multiplexed immunofluorescence (HMIF) images. In laymans’ terms, it’s used in biology research to understand single-cell spatial relationships. There are some machine learning algorithms built in to help biologists and researchers understand and interact with the images. HistoJS also offers real-time image processing, giving faster information and facilitating the identification of disease-specific signatures. Congrats on shipping out the first major version 🥳.

JDSP 3.0

Standing for Java Digital Single Processing, JDSP is a library of signal processing tools aimed at providing functionalities in Java. These are similar functionalities to those available in MATLAB. JDSP provides lightweight APIs for performing complex operations on signals. The latest version features new modules, new functions for polynomial fitting, and new functions for generating random numbers. Read into release notes for all the breaking changes.

MDXEditor 2.0

React is a popular library JavaScript library for building interfaces. MDXEditor is a React component where users can author markdown documents naturally. No more code samples with sneaky syntax errors! What you see is what you get. Markdown is rich text, styled in the same way as the rest of your pages including tables, images, code blocks, and more. The latest update comes with a brand new plugin management system, refreshed dependencies, and a few other minor goodies. Check out the release notes for all the major changes.

embedded-hal 1.0

From the Rust Embedded Working Group comes embedded-hal, a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for embedded systems. It serves as a foundation for building an ecosystem made up of platform agonistic libraries. The crates—which are specific libraries—provide traits which can then be used for peripherals commonly available in microcontrollers such as GPIO, UART, SPI or I2C. In this way, developers can write to any microcontroller driver with an embedded-hal implementation without modifying the driver. Congratulations to the team for the first stable release of embedded-hal. If you are a hardware or embedded software engineer, definitely check out this project.

Probot 13.0

Do you want a framework for building GitHub apps? Then look no further than Probot. Make building GitHub applications easier, and seamlessly integrate with the API. This major release brings support and tests for modern Node. The latest Octokit releases all support Node. More updates include allowing for the use of the latest GitHub features, and writing apps in ESM. If you’d like to get into building GitHub apps, check out the documentation, and start using Probot to make things easier.

AdonisJS 6.0

More frameworks! AdonisJS is a TypeScript web framework for building web apps and API servers. It comes with support for testing, modern tooling, an ecosystem of official packages, and lots more features. This is the first major release to AdonisJS in almost four years. With so much time spent on the project since then, version 6.0 improves the framework in many ways. These include migration to ES modules and rewriting the IoC container to be simpler. There are also changes to the Type-safety in Routes and Controllers bindings, and to the Type-safe event emitter and environment variables. Read up on all the changes in the blog post:

After four years in the AdonisJS v5 era, we are pleased to release AdonisJS 6.

Happy coding! 🎉https://t.co/F4o7p77lYS

— AdonisJS (@adonisframework) January 24, 2024

Moby 25.0

With over 67,000 GitHub Stars, Moby is a popular project created by Docker to enable and accelerate software containerisation. If you like LEGO, then Moby provides a LEGO-set style toolkit of components. Some of these components include container build tools, a container registry, orchestration tools, a runtime, and more. You can use these as building blocks for other containers and projects. Moby is a place where people can experiment, build, and share their ideas. Moby 25.0 adds OpenTelemetry tracing, support for CDI devices under Linux, and so much more.

CuPy 13.0

Python lovers and GPU nerds will love this library. CuPy is a NumPy/SciPy-compatible array library for GPU-accelerated computing with Python. It also provides access to low-level CUDA features. Combining more than 270 pull requests, version 13.0 brings some cool new features including an additional 140 signal processing routines, all compatible with SciPy’s scipy.signal. Whilst CUDA is a sort after feature, for a long time there were issues when calling import cupy if CUDA was not installed. This new release makes it so all CUDA Toolkit libraries are lazily-loaded. There are more APIs in this latest release and support for cuTENSOR 2.0. Check out the blog for all the changes:

🎉We have released CuPy v13.0.0🎉
This release includes distributed arrays, increased SciPy functions coverage, cuSignal integration, and many other exciting features! Check the highlights on our blog: https://t.co/sIRs87UfIB

— CuPy (@CuPy_Team) January 18, 2024

WordPress for Android 4.0

Bloggers, writers, and journalists rejoice, for there is an update to WordPress for Android. The latest version brings some welcome features to the WordPress mobile experience. When editing text blocks, the keyboard now remains instead of disappearing. Next time you insert a block, the screen will auto-scroll to that new block. Pressing the back button on your mobile device will unselect a block, and you can now share different types of media at once without the app crashing. This will enable writers and editors to quickly write and ship blog posts on the go. Check out the changelog for all the updates.

Apollo 4.0

From the VueJS team comes the Apollo/GraphQL integration for VueJS. Apollo is the set of tools for working with GraphQL. It provides automatic updates, and supports all Vue APIs. The latest update brings a useLazyQuery, and a bunch of bug fixes. There are also improvements to ESM support, and some documentation updates, and more. Check out the release notes for all the details, and head to the website to start using Apollo.

Release Radar January

Well, that’s all for this edition. Don’t forget to read more about what the community is up to on GitHub in our State of the Octoverse Report. This report covers everything from the most popular languages, fastest growing communities, artificial intelligence, and more.

Thank you to everyone who submitted a project to be featured. We loved reading all about the great things you’re all working on. Whether your project was featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, regardless of whether you shipped your first your project’s first version, or you launched 7.0.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects from October to December. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you’re working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we’d love to hear from you. Check out the Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.

Written by

Michelle Mannering

@MishManners

I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.