The latest versions of Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset are available now in beta. Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 delivers the latest stable versions of many popular open source runtime languages and databases natively to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. These components are supported for up to five years, helping to enable a more consistent, efficient, and reliable developer experience.

New collections in the latest release of Red Hat Software Collections include:

  • Python 3.8 which introduces assignment expressions and several optimizations to make Python 3.8 run faster than previous versions with previous version compatibility to ease upgrade strategies.

  • Ruby 2.7 featuring a large number of new features such as Pattern Matching, REPL improvements and Compaction GC for fragmented memory spaces.

  • Perl 5.30 adds new features for developers such as the limited variable length lookbehinds, Unicode 12.1, faster string interpolation and other performance improvements.

  • Apache httpd 2.4 (update) fixes a number of bugs and includes an updated version of mod_md to support ACMEv2.

  • Varnish 6 updates Varnish Cache to version 6.0.6, the latest bi-annual fresh release with numerous bug fixes and performance improvements.

  • Java Mission Control 7.1 updates JDK Mission Control to version 7.1.1 and fixes numerous bugs. It also adds key enhancements, including multiple rule optimizations, a new JOverflow view based on Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), a new flame graph view and a new latency visualization using the High Dynamic Range (HDR) Histogram.

  • HAProxy 1.8.24 provides multiple bug and security fixes.

Available with Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 is Red Hat Developer Toolset 9.1, an updated, curated collection of compilers, toolchains, debuggers and other critical development tools. Forming the foundation of Developer Toolset 9.1 is GCC 9.3, a new update of the popular open source compiler collection. Additional updates in Developer Toolset 9.1 center on delivering new updates of C/C++ and Fortran debugging and performance tools.

All new collections in Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 are also available as Red Hat Certified Containers through the Red Hat Container Catalog. This makes it easier to build and deploy mission-critical applications using the supported components of Red Hat Software Collections for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift environments.

Red Hat Software Collections 3.5 continues Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice in terms of the underlying compute architecture, with availability across x86_64, ppc64le, s390x and aarch64 hardware.

Red Hat customers with active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions can access Red Hat Software Collections via the Red Hat Software Collections repository.

For more information, please read the full beta release notes.

Brian Gollaher is product manager, Platforms Business Unit at Red Hat.