Languages and Frameworks Thoughtworks Technology Radar test suites and that it comes with a comprehensive set of matchers, which allow for expressive tests in an elegant internal DSL. In addition to its support for property-based testing — a technique we’ve highlighted previously in the Radar — our teams like the solid IntelliJ plugin and the growing community of support. 77. Swift Package Manager Trial Some programming languages, especially newer ones, have a package and dependency management solution built in. When it was introduced in 2014, Swift didn’t come with a package manager, and so the macOS and iOS developer community simply kept using CocoaPods and Carthage, the third-party solutions that had been created for Objective-C. A couple of years later Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM) was started as an official Apple open-source project, and it then took another few years before Apple added support for it to Xcode. Even at that point, though, many development teams continued to use CocoaPods and Carthage, mostly because many packages were simply not available via SwiftPM. Now that most packages can be included via SwiftPM and processes have been further streamlined for both creators and consumers of packages, our teams are increasingly relying on SwiftPM. 78. Vowpal Wabbit Trial Vowpal Wabbit is a general-purpose machine-learning library. Originally created at Yahoo! Research over a decade ago, Vowpal Wabbit continues to implement new algorithms in reinforcement learning. We want to highlight Vowpal Wabbit 9.0, a major release after six years, and encourage you to plan the migration as it has several usability improvements, new reductions and bug fixes. 79. Android Gradle plugin - Kotlin DSL Assess Android Gradle plugin - Kotlin DSL added support for Kotlin Script as an alternative to Groovy for Gradle build scripts. The goal of replacing Groovy with Kotlin is to provide better support for refactoring and simpler editing in IDEs as well as ultimately to produce code that is easier to read and maintain. For teams already using Kotlin it also means working on the build in a familiar language. We had a team with an at least seven-year-old 450-line build script migrate within a few days. If you have large or complex gradle build scripts, then it’s worth assessing whether Kotlin Script will produce better outcomes for your teams. 80. Azure Bicep Assess For those who prefer a more natural language than JSON for infrastructure code, Azure Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that uses a declarative syntax. It supports reusable parameterized templates for modular resource definitions. A Visual Studio Code extension provides instant type- safety, intellisense and syntax checking, and the compiler allows bidirectional transpilation to and from ARM templates. Bicep’s resource-oriented DSL and native integration with the Azure ecosystem make it a compelling choice for Azure infrastructure development. 81. Capacitor Assess We’ve been debating the merits of cross-platform mobile development tools for nearly as long as we’ve been publishing the Technology Radar. We first noted a new generation of tools in 2011 when © Thoughtworks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 35