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Release Radar • March 2024 Edition

Some of you around the world may have been eating chocolate this past week. Others might be enjoying the last few weeks of snow. Regards, developers everywhere are hard at work, shipping new updates for open source projects. There are all kinds of projects receiving new versions, from weekend hobbies to world changing technology. It's our job to find them, and showcase some of our favourites, so here are our staff for this month's Release Radar.

FusionCache 1.0

Want an easy to use cache with advanced resiliency features? Look no further than FusionCache. It's built for performance, good refresh rates, better auto-setup, better logs, and more. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major and stable version 🎉 and receiving over 3.8 million downloads.

Yes I know this was shipped in February, but since I'm in Australia and live in the future, it was shipped on 1st March for me, so I'm including it here in the March Release Radar 😉.

Brainchop 3.0

We featured Brainchop back in the February 2023 Release Radar. Since then, Brainchop is back with a powerful model update. Brainchop is a 3D MRI rendering and segmentation tool for analysing and processing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs) of various brains. Using AI, the new version features three classes of models for processing and analysing images of brains. Here are the three new models:

Carapace 1.0

It's exciting when something breaks out on its own, and that's what's happened with Carapace. Originally part of a 13-piece project, it now has a major first version and it's a multi-shell completion library and binary. Carapace consists of a pflag fork, a yaml spec, a shell lexer, a completion bridge and various scrapers. Congratulations to the team on shipping your first version 🥳.

Carapace Shell

Storybook 8.0

If you're into UI development, then you need to know about Storybook. It's a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. The latest version brings some big improvements for testing and documentation with built-in visual testing. There's also React Server Component support, improved controls for React and Vue projects, as well as improved Vite architecture, Vitest testing, and Vite 5 support. Check out all the major changes in the Storybook changelog.

Storybook UI

Moby 26.0

Having been featured in our February 2023, and January 2024 Release Radars, Moby is the original Linux Container runtime. This new version adds a bunch of changes to the Docker CLI and Moby itself with additional features. There's bug fixes and enhancements, with the main thing for users to be on the look out for containers that were created using Docker Engine 25.0.0. These containers might have duplicate MAC addresses, and thus must be recreated. The same goes for those containers created with Moby 25.0+ and with user defined MAC addresses. Read up on all these changes in the release notes.

PixiJS 8.0

If you're into video game dev, then PixiJS is something you need to know about. It's a HTML5 game engine that provides a lightweight 2D library across all devices. This latest update has a new package structure, custom builds, graphics API overhaul, and lots more. You can read about all these changes in the PixiJS Migration Guide. Also big congrats to PixiJS for being part of the open source community for ten years now! 😮.

Babylon.js 7.0

It's been around for a while, and we've featured it in the April 2019 and March 2022 Release Radars. It's also been in GitHub Game Bytes and on our latest episode of The Download. Yes, I'm talking about Babylon, the powerful web rendering engine for all kinds of graphics. The newest update includes support for basic Global Illumination, a highly requested feature. Read more about other cool new additions including Gaussian Splatting, Ragdoll physics, Procedural Geometry and all the breaking changes in the Babylon release notes.

tabler-icons 3.0

Use Tabler Icons for over 5200 pixel perfect icons designed for the web. This latest set expands the library further with 244 new icons. There's also more support backward compatibility, and more design options for webs, mobile, and desktop applications. All icons now also come in both outlined and filled versions to suit even more preferences and requirements. Check out all the icons on the website.

Outlined and lined icons from Tabler Icons

Gleam 1.0

Want a friendly language for building safe systems at scale? Gleam is here for you. It features modern and familiar syntax, that's reliable and scalable. Gleam runs on an Erlang virtual machine, and can run plenty of concurrent tasks. It comes with a compiler, build tool, formatter, editor integrations, and package manager all built in so you can get started right away. Congrats to the team on shipping your first major version 🙌.

Gleam

Haystack 2.0

People like to be on the AI bandwagon, but to have good AI models, you need good LLM (large language models). Welcome to Haystack, it's an end-to-end LLM framework that allows you to build applications powered by LLMs, Transformer models, vector search and more. The latest version is a rewrite of the Haystack framework, and includes a new package, powerful pipelines, customisable components, prompt templating, and more. Read all about them in the Haystack release notes.

GitHub logo deepset-ai / haystack

🔍 AI orchestration framework to build customizable, production-ready LLM applications. Connect components (models, vector DBs, file converters) to pipelines or agents that can interact with your data. With advanced retrieval methods, it's best suited for building RAG, question answering, semantic search or conversational agent chatbots.

Green logo of a stylized white 'H' with the text 'Haystack, by deepset. Haystack 2.0 is live 🎉' Abstract green and yellow diagrams in the background.
CI/CD Tests types - Mypy Coverage Status Ruff
Docs Website
Package PyPI PyPI - Downloads PyPI - Python Version Conda Version GitHub License Compliance
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Haystack is an end-to-end LLM framework that allows you to build applications powered by LLMs, Transformer models, vector search and more. Whether you want to perform retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) document search, question answering or answer generation, Haystack can orchestrate state-of-the-art embedding models and LLMs into pipelines to build end-to-end NLP applications and solve your use case.

Installation

The simplest way to get Haystack is via pip:

pip install haystack-ai
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Haystack supports multiple installation methods including Docker images. For a comprehensive guide please refer to the documentation.

Documentation

If you're new to the project, check out "What is Haystack?" then go through the "Get Started Guide" and build your first LLM application in a matter of minutes. Keep learning with the tutorials. For more advanced use cases, or just to get some inspiration, you can browse our Haystack recipes in the Cookbook.

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Release Radar month year

Well, that’s all for this edition. Thank you to everyone who submitted a project to be featured 🙏. We loved reading all about the great things everyone is working on. Whether your project was featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release 🎉, regardless of whether you shipped your project's first version, or you launched 26.0.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the great open source projects that released major version projects in February.

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.

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