Nobody Puts GitLab in the Corner – InApps Technology 2025

GitLab, now attaining that revered “unicorn” valuation status, is not just a GitHub alternative,  the company’s CEO Sid Sijbrandij let the world know in a TechCrunch article this week about the company’s $100 million Series D round of funding.

Even as I sat down to write about this, I looked back to news of GitHub’s acquisition earlier this year, which came with a migration of fearful developers to GitLab, with “over 100,000 repos imported, a 7x increase in orders and over 2,000 people on Twitter going nuts about the #movingtogitlab trend.” However, as Sijbrandij tells Techcrunch, “The biggest misunderstanding we’re seeing is that GitLab is an alternative to GitHub and we’ve grown beyond that. We are now in nine categories all the way from planning to monitoring.”

According to the TechCrunch interview, GitLab users (and “co-creators”) can look forward to this funding being used to “get those contributions over the finish line, making sure performance and quality stay up, [and] establish[ing] a consistent user interface,” as well as new features like tracing and log aggregation.

In GitLab’s announcement of the funding, it touts itself as “the world’s first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle,” highlighting the more than 100,000 organizations that “use GitLab to deploy to multiple clouds, implement cloud native architectures, and practice Concurrent DevOps.” Indeed, if you thought GitLab was only competing with GitHub, the company calls out the “toolchain crisis” faced by today’s enterprises that are “investing time and resources into piecing together disparate tools from different stages of the software development and operations lifecycle” which include “tools like VersionOne, Jira, GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, Electric Cloud, Puppet, New Relic, and BlackDuck.”

In speaking with VentureBeat, Sijbrandij conceded that it has some ways to go to outpace all of its competitors, but of course, the explicit solution here is this fresh cash injection.

“Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat. “Some newer tools like monitoring are more recent and need to catch up, but with this raise, we have to money to do help our community to do so.”

For more on the future of your not-just-a-GitHub-alternative GitLab, check out the video:

This Week in Programming

• Rust’s Fairly Small 1.29 Update: First up this week, the Rust team has announced Rust 1.29, which it calls fairly small in comparison to the upcoming Rust 1.30 and 1.31. As a matter of fact, they write, “the two most significant things in this release aren’t even language features: they’re new abilities that Cargo has grown, and they’re both about lints.” With 1.29, the “cargo fix” subcommand can now automatically fix your code that has warnings, and cargo clippy is a bunch of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code. Right now, even these small features are limited, but will expand to cover more suggested fixes over time.
• Kotlin 1.2.7.0 Ups Its Incremental Compilation Game: JetBrains has announced Kotlin 1.2.70 and JAXEnter sums up the release as significantly improving incremental compilation for Kotlin/JS. According to the announcement, the newly refactored incremental compilation “can speed up development builds up to 7 times and even more” depending on the project structure. Additionally, Kotlin/JS Gradle builds now support cross-module incremental compilation, although this feature is experimental and disabled by default.  Other new features highlighted include “native binaries built with Excelsior JET for the standalone Kotlin compiler, as well as new refactorings, inspections, and intentions to the IntelliJ IDEA plugin.”
• Swift 4.2 Jumps on the Generics Train: It seems like we’ve been talking about generics a lot lately, and now with the release of Swift 4.2, the Mac-focused language gets in on the game. The release is said to build on its predecessor by “delivering faster compile times, improving the debugging experience, updating the standard library, and converging on binary compatibility.” In addition, it also has worked to improve generics, helping you to reduce “the amount of boilerplate needed in your code and make more of your code reusable.” For a full tour, make sure to check out the video.
• Flutter Release Preview 2: Last up for our dot releases this week, Google announced the final release preview for Flutter before Flutter’s 1.0 release. One of the main focuses in this release is the ability to “build applications that closely follow the Apple interface guidelines,” but that’s not all. Check out the video for a quick intro:

• Slack gets Bitbucket Deployment Updates: Having spent some time digging into the chatbot phenomenon (mostly to determine that there’s not much there, there, yet), the genre I found the most promise in was that of chatbots built by devs for devs. Well, this week Bitbucket announced the ability to get Bitbucket deployment updates from its Slack chatbot, which will automatically alert your team when a deployment occurs. The bot can be configured to notify upon “successful, stopped and failed deployments that are tracked by Bitbucket Deployments.” Basically, whatever the status of the deployment, your team can be notified and even the team member responsible for the deployment can be mentioned specifically. Notifications can also be configured to alert your team as to whether a “deployment was manually stopped, or if a deployment was paused because another pipeline” was in the process of being deployed to the same environment, as Bitbucket Deployments offers inbuilt support for automatic concurrency control. For full details on configuring deployment notifications, check out the documentation.
• Sublime Gets Git: From the makers of Sublime Text comes the new Git client everyone is talking about this week, Sublime Merge, which the company says “combines the UI engine of Sublime Text, with a from-scratch implementation of Git.” And in a move that one Redditor quips is “Lawful Evil,” a fully-functional evaluation version is available for download with “no time limit, no accounts, no metrics, and no tracking” but…”restricted to the light theme only.” Daaaaaaaaamn, Sublime, you play dirty.
• GitHub Experiments: In a move reminiscent of Google Labs, GitHub has introduced Experiments, “a collection of demonstrations highlighting our most exciting research projects—and the ideas behind them.” Experiments starts off with Semantic Code Search, which “allows you to use natural language to search for code by intent, rather than just keyword matching.” Neat!

Feature image via Pixabay.