NEWS.md

Julia v0.2.0 Release Notes

New language features

• Keyword & optional function arguments (#485, #1817).

• Immutable types (#13).

• Triple-quoted string literals (#70).

• New variable bindings on each for loop and comprehension iteration (#1571). For example, before this change:

  julia> map(f->f(), { ()->i for i=1:3 })
  3-element Any Array:
   3
   3
   3
  

  and after:

  julia> map(f->f(), { ()->i for i=1:3 })
  3-element Any Array:
   1
   2
   3
  

• Explicit relative importing (#2375)

New library functions

• Sampling profiler (#2597).

• Functions for examining stages of the compiler's output: code_lowered, code_typed, code_llvm, and code_native

• Multimedia I/O API (display, writemime, etcetera) (#3932).

• MPFR-based BigFloat (#2814), and many new BigFloat operations.

• New half-precision IEEE floating-point type, Float16 (#3467).

• methodswith shows all methods with an argument of specific type.

• mapslices provides a general way to perform operations on slices of arrays (#2204)

• Collections.PriorityQueue type and Collections.heap functions (#2920).

• quadgk 1d-integration routine (#3140).

• erfinv and erfcinv functions (#2987).

• varm, stdm (#2265)

• logdet (#3070)

• names for C-compatible types: Cchar, Clong, etc (#2370).

• cglobal to access global variables (#1815)

• unsafe_pointer_to_objref (#2468) and pointer_from_objref (#2515)

• readandwrite for external processes

• I/O functions readbytes and readbytes! (#3878).

• flush_cstdio function (#3949).

• ClusterManager makes it possible to support different types of compute clusters (#3649, #4014).

• rmprocs for removing processors from a parallel computing session. The system can also tolerate to some extent processors that die unexpectedly (#3050).

• interrupt for interrupting worker processes (#3819).

• timedwait does a polled wait for an event till a specified timeout.

• Condition type with wait and notify functions for synchronizing Tasks

• versioninfo provides detailed version information

Library improvements

• Sort API updates (#3665).

• delete!(d::Dict, key) has now been split into separate pop! and delete! variants: the former returns the deleted value and behaves like the old delete!, and the latter returns d and does not throw an exception if key was not found (#3439).

• Linear-algebra factorization routines (lu, chol, etc.) now return Factorization objects (and lud, chold, etc. are deprecated) (#2212).

• A number of improvements to sparse matrix capabilities and sparse linear algebra.

• More linear algebra fixes and eigensolver hooks for SymTridiagonal, Tridiagonal and Bidiagonal matrix types (#2606, #2608, #2609, #2611, #2678, #2713, #2720, #2725)

• Change integer_valued, real_valued, and so on to isinteger, isreal, and so on, and semantics of the later are now value-based rather than type-based, unlike Matlab/Octave (#3071). isbool and iscomplex are eliminated in favor of general iseltype function.

• Transitive comparison of floats with rationals (#3102).

• Fast primality testing (da670c4).

• sum and cumsum now use pairwise summation for better accuracy (#4039).

• Dot operators (.+, .* etc.) now broadcast singleton dimensions of array arguments. This behavior can be applied to any function using broadcast(f, ...).

• combinations, permutations, and partitions now return iterators instead of a task. and integer_partitions has been renamed to partitions (#3989 and #4055).

• isreadable/iswritable functions added for more IO types (#3872).

• Much faster and improved readdlm and writedlm (#3350, #3468, #3483).

• Faster matchall (#3719), and a number of string and regex improvements.

• Documentation for writing packages (#2714, 2769, #2791) and linear algebra (#2807)

• Support optional RTLD flags in dlopen (#2380)

• Options in pmap for retrying or ignoring failed tasks. Also pmap now works with any iterable.

Deprecated or removed

• ComplexPair was renamed to Complex and made immutable, and Complex128 and so on are now aliases to the new Complex type.

• ! was added to the name of many mutating functions, e.g., push was renamed push! (#907).

• ref renamed to getindex, and assign to setindex! (#1484).

• writeable renamed to writable (#3874).

• logb and ilogb renamed to exponent (#2516).

• quote_string renamed to repr.

• safe_char, check_ascii, and check_utf8 replaced by is_valid_char, is_valid_ascii, and is_valid_utf8, respectively.

• each_line, each_match, begins_with, ends_with, parse_float, parse_int, and seek_endreplaced by:eachline, eachmatch, and so on (_` was removed) (#1539).

• parse_bin(s) replaced by parseint(s,2); parse_oct(s) replaced by parseint(s,8); parse_hex(s) replaced by parseint(s,16).

• findn_nzs replaced by findnz (#1539).

• DivideByZeroError replaced by DivideError.

• addprocs_ssh, addprocs_ssh_tunnel, and addprocs_local replaced by addprocs (with keyword options).

• remote_call, remote_call_fetch, and remote_call_wait replaced by remotecall, remotecall_fetch, and remotecall_wait.

• has replaced by contains for sets and by haskey for dictionaries.

• diagmm and diagmm! replaced by scale and scale! (#2916).

• unsafe_ref and unsafe_assign replaced by unsafe_load and unsafe_store!.

• add_each! and del_each! replaced by union! and setdiff!

• isdenormal renamed to issubnormal (#3105).

• expr replaced by direct call to Expr constructor.

• |, &, $, -, and ~ for sets replaced by union, intersect symdiff, setdiff, and complement (#3272).

• square function removed.

• pascal function removed.

• add and add! for Set replaced by push!.

• Deprecated ls function in favor of readdir or ; ls in the REPL.

• start_timer now expects arguments in units of seconds, not milliseconds.

• Shell redirection operators |, >, and < were eliminated in favor of a new operator |> (#3523).

• amap is deprecated in favor of new mapslices functionality.

Bugfixes and performance updates

Too numerous to mention.