The system Python 3 stack has been upgraded to 3.3 (the system Python 2 stack remains at 2.7 ), bringing in hundreds of fixes and tweaks; for a list of changes see http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.3.html

Fedora 18 will provide Ruby on Rails 3.2, the latest version of the Ruby on Rails framework. Developers are able to use the latest Ruby on Rails features, which are documented in the project's release notes at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/3_2_release_notes.html and http://guides.rubyonrails.org/3_1_release_notes.html

Fedora 18 now ships a more complete Clojure programming stack, including the build tool Leiningen. This will make it easier to package other Clojure libraries in the future.

An update to git in Fedora 18 has moved the file used by bash to include git branch information in the prompt. Users that take advantage of the git prompt in their bash configuration should add source /usr/share/doc/git-1.7.12/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh to their ~/.bashrc in addition to PS1='[\u@\h`__git_ps1` \W]\$ '

Fedora 18 will include Boost version 1.50 . The popular collection of C libraries is updated to the newest available version with each Fedora release.

Systemtap 2.0 includes a new prototype backend, which uses DynInst to instrument a user's own binaries at runtime. This optional alternative backend does not use kernel modules, and does not require root privileges, but is restricted with respect to the kinds of probes and other constructs that a script may use.

Developers looking to improve their applications will find that Fedora 18's lttng-tools and ltt-ust packages provide fast and efficient tracing. The tracer allows easy correlation of userspace and kernel traces, if the latter is available. Boasting a nanosecond-precision timestamp, LTTng is especially useful when searching for elusive latencies. Get started with the project's documentation at http://lttng.org/quickstart

IPython has been updated to version 0.13 and notable features and head-ups are: The Notebook has a new user interface and has many new features like auto-folding of very long lines, uploading new notebooks to the dashboard, manage started clusters and improved tooltips. The notebook format has changed and when you want to share your notebook with users of older version, there is a conversion script available. New cell magics like %%bash, %%ruby, %%timeit and many others. The Qt console has improved menus and can directly display jpeg images.

DragonEgg is a plugin for the GCC compilers to allow use of the LLVM optimization and code generation framework. DragonEgg provides software developers with more optimization and code generation options for use with the GCC compilers. DragonEgg also allows GCC to be used for cross-compilation to target architectures supported by LLVM without requiring any special cross-compilation compiler packages.