PHP 8.0 is out today as expected as a major update to this widely-used programming language for server-side programming and other purposes.

PHP 8.0 introduces an optional JIT compiler, integrates the existing JSON support to core (no longer optional), and adds language support for attributes, union types, a static return type, and other additions. See yesterday's article for some of the PHP 8.0 features and preliminary benchmark data with more performance tests forthcoming.

More details on the PHP

Unigine 2 remains one of the most visually stunning game and simulation engines out there. That's even with still using OpenGL (or Direct3D 11 also on Windows) while their Vulkan renderer remains in the works. Unigine 2.13 is out this week as their latest iteration of this visually incredible engine with first-rate Linux support.

Unigine 2.13 adds a GPU lightmapper tool, adds subpixel reconstruction anti-aliasing, even better looking 3D volumetric clouds, performance optimizations, tessellation improvements

OpenZFS 2.0 is getting quite close to release but isn't over the finish line yet and this week brings the seventh release candidate.

OpenZFS 2.0-RC7 is lighter than some of the past release candidates so it looks like work may be winding down. OpenZFS 2.0 is a big release with Zstd compression, mainlined FreeBSD support, various performance improvements, sequential resilvering, persistent L2ARC support, and many other changes.

With OpenZFS 2.0-RC7 there is a change

While the Radeon RX 6800 series is now shipping that was developed under the Sienna Cichlid codename, there are other fishy codenames remaining and are seeing more work for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will officially open development in December and then likely reaching stable in February.

AMD on Wednesday sent out more AMDGPU kernel driver updates for Navy Flounder and Dimgrey Cavefish . Navy and Dimgrey are for unreleased AMD Radeon products that appear to be for additional RDNA 2 / Radeon RX 6000 series parts. Nothing

For those with some extra time around the US Thanksgiving holiday, the Arcan display server/environment is out with a new release. This is the interesting project that's powered in part by a game engine , offers X11 and Wayland compatibility , ported to BSDs , and more recently has been exploring VR and other desktop innovations .

Arcan 0.6 is the new release out as of this week. Arcan 0.6 brings initial network transparency support that the developers feel is more powerful than the X11

The Godot Game Engine has been funding work on a GPU-based texture compressor to deal with the issue that importing textures to this leading open-source game engine can often be painfully slow.

Betsy is the open-source project being worked on for the Godot Engine. Betsy implements BC6, ETC1, ETC2, and EAC algorithms among others using GLSL compute shaders. This compressor is implemented as GLSL compute shaders so the work can be offloaded to the graphics processor either via OpenGL or Vulkan usage as well.

Blender has been gaining a lot of ground this year with numerous prominent organizations now backing its development (just most recently, Facebook) and just at the end of summer they delivered Blender 2.90 while out today is Blender 2.91.

Blender 2.91 is the project's fourth and last major release of 2021 with a focus on enhancing the user experience and usability of this cross-platform, open-source 3D modeling software. There are also improvements to new tooling

PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server.

PHP 8.0 is a very worthy successor to last year's PHP 7.4. Besides the JIT compiler there is a ton of