The Racket programming language project has released Racket version 9.0. Racket is a descendant of Scheme, so it is part of the Lisp family of languages. The headline feature in the release is parallel threads, which adds to the concurrency tools in the language: "While Racket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism via futures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition." Other new features include the black-box wrapper to prevent the compiler from optimizing calculations away, the decompile-linklet function to map linklets back to an s-expression, the addition of Weibull distributions to the math library, and more.

The Oracle blog has a lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs.

We describe here two new GNU extensions which specify size information for FAMs. These are a new attribute, "counted_by" and a new builtin function, "__builtin_counted_by_ref". Both extensions can be used in GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general.

This work has been covered on LWN as well.

The call for candidates for the 2025 election for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board has been posted.

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF's board of directors; it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community conference planning, and more.

Nominations close on December 13.

Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists, is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 ("Unpacking in Comprehensions") was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In early November, the steering council accepted the PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python 3.15 in October 2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is an inconsistency that has been apparent for a while—to the point that some Python programmers assume that it is already present in the language.

Version 8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new "|>" operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines equivalent:

    $result = strlen("Hello world");
    $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, "#[\NoDiscard]" to indicate that the return value should be used, attributes on constants, and more; see the migration guide for details.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (delve and golang), Debian (webkit2gtk), Oracle (expat and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (chromium, grub2, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cups-filters, imagemagick, and libcupsfilters).