Market report December 2023

Here are some of the few trends we are seeing across the industry, in our projects, as well as our community. This market report isn't exhaustive, at least just yet, with certain trends not yet listed such as Blockchain, data management, DevEx, etc. We see a lot of promising trends and we hope that understanding what engineers and firms are becoming more passionate about that it will help us create a foundation of ideas and knowledge.

Generative AI continues to gain mainstream traction

  • Faster inference demands for AI models through speculative decoding: A technique to increase inference speed by 2x or more by optimizing how an LLM or AI model replies in real time.
  • Increasing releases of open models: Many new quality models have been released, with Mistral and Llama 2 standing out. Additionally, there are over 400k models available on Huggingface. This provides available resources to enable organizations and startups to experiment and build upon those existing models.
  • Explosion in education and training programs for developers on generative AI: Resources such as OpenAI's Prompt Engineering Guide (link) and Microsoft's free programming resources (link) are becoming increasingly popular. Amazon has reportedly trained 21 million tech learners worldwide in various tech skills.

The re-emergence of WebGPU

GPUs are known for their capacity to perform numerical operations simultaneously, surpassing CPUs in various applications beyond graphics and gaming. Machine learning algorithms, which frequently depend on matrix operations, can be executed expediently on GPUs. Currently supported on Chrome and Edge, notable upcoming implementations include Firefox and Safari.

  • Microsoft Azure's CTO has advocated for Rust to replace C & C++ in system-level software (source).
  • Lua, known for its lightweight scripting, is particularly popular in game development.
  • Dart's growth is largely attributed to the rising popularity of Flutter.
  • Language adoption varies by region. In Vietnam, the ranking is JavaScript > Java > Python > PHP > Ruby > C# (with Rust at #37). Globally, the trend is JavaScript > Python > Java > C++ > PHP > C > Ruby.

Actor model in computing

The Actor model is a computational model that supports concurrency, a topic frequently mentioned in languages known for high concurrency, such as Rust, Elixir, and Java. It has been effectively implemented in tech giants like Discord and PayPal.

Rise in enterprise demand for security and complianceAsCode

Compliance as code refers to creating policies inside code that an organization can follow and automatically test and enforce. There have been more security concerns and demand for more stringent processes to avoid data leaks and vulnerabilities, which Compliance as Code can help alleviate.

Popularity in asset provenance through blockchain apps such as Hyperledger Fabric or OBADA through pNFT standards

Based on our recent talks and the Hyperledger community, there is higher demand for enterprise companies wanting to track assets across businesses. Hyperledger Fabric and Obada, with their pNFT standard, helps verify and keep track of those assets across the blockchain.

Stylex as a competitor to CSS styling systems like Tailwind

A recently open-sourced library from Facebook aiming to compete with CSS-in-JS, used for defining styles for optimized user interfaces. It was introduced as a custom solution for the new Facebook website to alleviate key pain points of CSS-in-JS for large React applications, such as unused styles, large CSS files, and CSS-in-JS library size.

References

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