I’m sad to report that Thomas Gilliard (satellit), who was a valued member of the QA team for many years, passed away last week. His wife contacted me with the news. Thomas was a regular and reassuring presence at QA and blocker review meetings and ran many thousands of tests since he first joined the team in 2009. He was particularly dedicated to testing our Sugar builds. We’ll miss him.

Also: Implementation of varlink support for libnmstate – GSoC’20 nmstate project

• Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: April 2020 Edition

  Before we get into the report, we must share that Youghourta Benali, one of the Arabic l10n community’s managers, has passed away due to prior health issues. He was a passionate activist for the open Web and Arabic’s presence on the Web, localizing Mozilla projects for over 7 years. We’ll all miss him and wish his family and friends peace at this time. The surviving Arabic managers are currently writing a guest post that we’ll post here when ready.

• WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds

  The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12.

• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox

  The group has mostly resolved the major architecture issues of the API. Recently we agreed on the WebGPU Shading Language direction based on the Tint prototype. We still need to solve a lot of design riddles before we make it available to end users to write shaders in.

  One of the unresolved issues is the API for data transfers between CPU and GPU. Working with memory directly is where the web platform differs greatly from native platforms. We’ve discussed a dozen different proposals but have not yet found a design solution that fulfills our principles.

  Overall, the spec is still heavily a work in progress. It’s available for early hackers but not recommended for any use in production yet. We are hoping to get a minimum-viable-product version of the spec and implementations by the end of 2020. The current state of implementations can be checked on webgpu.io.

It is with great sadness that I must report we lost a great community member today. Octavio Mendez, a long-time cornerstone of the Mexican Blender and open source community, has passed away after fighting the Corona virus.

Claudio Malefico Andaur contacted me about this, and shared the following...

Also: For real...

• Lars Kurth RIP

  Ian Jackson posted a note to the xen-announce mailing list with the sad news that Xen community manager and project advisory board member Lars Kurth has died.

• Lars Kurth

  I'm very sad to inform you that Lars Kurth passed away earlier this
  week.  Many of us regarded Lars as a personal friend, and his loss is a
  great loss to the Xen Project.
  
  We plan to have a tribute to Lars on the XenProject blog in the near
  future.  Those who are attending FOSDEM may wish to attend the short
  tribute we plan for Sunday morning:
    https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/vai_memory_of_lars_kurth/
  
  For the moment, Lars's mail aliases @xenproject.org, and the
  community.manager@xenproject alias, will be forwarded to myself
  and/or George Dunlap.
  
  Ian Jackson.