Tech Pulse: GitLab Ban, Huawei R&D Surge, New DLang, VS Online & More
A roundup of recent tech developments covering GitLab's hiring restrictions on Chinese staff, Huawei's massive R&D investment, the D language 2.089.0 release, Visual Studio Online launch, Ant Design and Electron updates, Edge Chromium preview, Tencent's facial payment initiative, and notable corporate moves by Microsoft Japan, Samsung, and others.
GitLab refuses Chinese employees
GitLab announced it will block hiring offers for Chinese and Russian citizens and prevent employees with access to customer data from relocating to those countries, sparking controversy on Hacker News.
Huawei's R&D scale
Huawei reported over 150 billion USD R&D spending in 2018, with pre‑research costs now required to exceed 20% of total R&D budgets, amounting to 20‑30 billion USD annually and employing more than 80 000 researchers worldwide.
D language 2.089.0 released
D 2.089.0 introduces 11 core improvements and fixes 66 issues, including corrected mangling in extern(C) mixin templates, enhanced atomic operations, support for linker driver arguments, and better LDC support in the dub package manager.
Visual Studio Online public preview
Microsoft finally opened the public preview of Visual Studio Online (web‑based VS Code) at Ignite 2019, offering a browser‑based editor with Git integration, extensions, and a built‑in terminal, enabling development from any device.
Ant Design 3.25.0 updates
Transfer listStyle now accepts a callback function.
Avatar icon property supports ReactNode.
TextArea supports allowClear.
Full changelog available on the Ant Design GitHub releases page.
Electron 7.0.1 bug‑fix release
Fixed shell.openExternal() workingDirectory Unicode handling.
Resolved menu.popup() related crashes.
Corrected label mismatches in GTK open/save dialogs.
Details at electronjs.org releases.
Microsoft Edge Chromium preview
Microsoft released the first Chromium‑based Edge release candidate, version 79.0.309.7, slated for stable launch on 15 January 2020 with support for over 90 languages.
Tencent facial‑payment collaboration
Tencent is working with banks and UnionPay to develop a facial‑recognition payment product that meets financial industry standards.
Ma Yun and Ma Huateng appointed Tsinghua Global Academic Advisors
The Tsinghua University School of Public Administration formed a Global Academic Advisory Committee, appointing Jack Ma and Pony Ma as members.
Microsoft Japan four‑day workweek
Microsoft Japan trialed a four‑day workweek, boosting employee sales productivity by 39.9% and cutting electricity use by 23.1% and printing by 58.7%.
Samsung China layoffs
Samsung China announced layoffs affecting more than one‑third of its staff, with the mobile division hit hardest.
Other headlines
Alibaba establishes Digital Hainan Co.
Apple rumored to co‑develop AR headset with Valve.
Crypto community invites Luo Yonghao to join.
China’s Tianhe‑2 calculates quantum supremacy benchmark.
Amazon Cloud revenue reaches $8.995 billion in Q3.
Xiaomi plans Japan smartphone market entry in 2020.
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