programming-languages

Apple's second Swift release of the WWDC 2026 cycle leans on ergonomics and performance: async cleanup in defer, condensed availability syntax, and a for-in protocol that borrows noncopyable elements.

The maintenance release folds in fixes from Scala's first external security audit, which found no critical or major issues but flagged a stored XSS in Scaladoc and an infinite loop in TASTy parsing.

JetBrains released Kotlin 2.4.0 on June 4, promoting context parameters and explicit backing fields to Stable, dropping the K1 compiler, and adding Swift package dependencies for Multiplatform.

The June 3 stable release completes Elixir's first type-system milestone: the compiler now infers and gradually type-checks every program for verified bugs without requiring any annotations.

Rust 1.96.0, released May 28, resolves a decade-old ergonomics gap with Copy-implementing range types from RFC 3550, stabilizes assert_matches!, tightens WebAssembly linking, and patches medium and low Cargo vulnerabilities affecting third-party registry users.

Multikernel Technologies releases KernelScript, an Apache 2.0-licensed DSL that generates eBPF, userspace, and kernel module code from a single source file.

Modular ships Mojo v1.0.0b1 on May 7, 2026, deprecating the fn keyword, enabling default CPU bounds checking, and expanding GPU support to AMD MI250X and NVIDIA B300.

The May 2026 major release hardens the BEAM runtime's security posture with quantum-resistant cryptography defaults and disabled SSH shell access, while adding experimental native records to the language for the first time.

JetBrains unveiled an official Kotlin extension for VS Code in alpha, previewed Kotlin 2.4-RC feature stabilizations, and published research showing Kotlin development cycles are 15–20% shorter than Java.

Flutter 3.44 and Dart 3.12 ship at Google I/O 2026 with agentic hot reload, Flutter GenUI on the A2UI protocol, Swift Package Manager as the iOS/macOS default, and Hybrid Composition++ for Android.

Zig 0.16.0 released April 14 with a mandatory I/O interface that eliminates function coloring, a 30,000-line type resolution redesign, and millisecond incremental builds.

R hit #8 in the TIOBE Index — matching its all-time high — as Python and R emerge as the two survivors in a rapidly consolidating statistical language market, while Go fell to #16 and Zig crept toward the top 30.