This was undone in in Julia 1.5 with #33864 for the REPL only. In fact, I didn’t even mention this particular change. I was very blasé about the change to for-loop bindings in my 1.0 release post. Julia 1.0 removed the notion of soft-scope from the language. I am writing this not to break down release by release,īut to highlight features that, had you only used Julia 1.0, you wouldn’t have seen.įull details can be found in the NEWS.md, and HISTORY.md Front-end changes Soft-scope in the REPL This post is kind of a follow-up to my Julia 1.0 release run-down.īut it’s going to be even longer, as it is covering the last 5 releases since then and I am not skipping the major new features. There have been too many cool new things (as this post will detail) to stay back to only 1.0 features.Īlready a lot of packages have dropped support for Julia versions older than 1.3. In practice I think for a lot of package maintainers 1.6 will be a LTS, in that that is the oldest version they will make sure to continue to support. So it’s looking likely to me that 1.7 will actually be the LTS but that it might also be a feature release – possibly this time a much shorter release period than usual. My impression now is that they feel like it has too many cool new things and that a few things didn’t quite make it in even with the extended release cycle.
The core developers have demurred on if 1.6 will actually be selected to be the new LTS (even if it is selected, it won’t ascend to being the LTS til it stops being the current Stable). Since it was going to be supported for a long-time, people wanted to make sure everything good got in thus it was a feature release.
The current LTS is Julia 1.0, which has now had 5 patch releases made. Julia 1.6 was soft-slated to be the new long-term-support (LTS) version that would have bug-fixes backported to it for the next few years. The release candidate is cut from the main branch every 3 months and they are released after an extensive round of additional checking, which often takes weeks to months. Since then, all releases (except 1.6) have been timed releases. Prior to 1.0, all releases were feature releases they came out when they were ready. Julia 1.6 will be the first “feature” release since 1.0. Thus this post, reflecting not just on 1.6, but on everything that has happened since the 1.0 release. So while that is all being checked and corner cases fixed, I think we have some time. The Julia Core team take a huge amount of care in not breaking any packages. I suspect we have at least a few more weeks before the final release. Julia 1.6 is a huge release and it is coming out relatively soon. Julia 1.0 was a commitment to no breaking changes,īut that is not to say no new features have been added to the language. Since then a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. Julia 1.0 came out well over 2 years ago.