Tag: what is programming

Computer scientists develop open-source tools for dramatically speeding up the programming language Python

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Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code for higher performance. There are many different programming languages—C++, Fortran and Java are some of the more well-known ones—but, in recent years, one language has become almost ubiquitous: Python. “Python is a ‘batteries-included’ language,” says Berger, who…Continue Reading

An open source challenger to GitHub Copilot? StarCoder2, a code generation tool backed by Nvidia, Hugging Face, and ServiceNow, is free to use and offers support for over 600 programming languages

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The StarCoder code generation tool has received a massive update that could position it as a leading open source alternative to services such as GitHub Copilot. Initially launched in May 2023 as part of a collaboration between Hugging Face and ServiceNow, the latest iteration, StarCoder2, now also has major industry backing in the form of Nvidia. The code generation tool supports developers by automating code completion, similar to GitHub Copilot or Amazon CodeWhisperer. It’s also capable of summarizing existing code and generating original snippets StarCoder2 is available in three different model sizes, each trained by a different member of the…Continue Reading