Julia v0.6.0 Release Notes

New language features

New type system capabilities (#8974, #18457)
- Type parameter constraints can refer to previous parameters, e.g. type Foo{R<:Real, A<:AbstractArray{R}}. Can also be used in method definitions.
- New syntax Array{T} where T<:Integer, indicating a union of types over all specified values of T (represented by a UnionAll type). This provides behavior similar to parametric methods or typealias, but can be used anywhere a type is accepted. This syntax can also be used in method definitions, e.g. function inv(M::Matrix{T}) where T<:AbstractFloat. Anonymous functions can have type parameters via the syntax ((x::Array{T}) where T<:Real) -> 2x.
- Implicit type parameters, e.g. Vector{<:Real} is equivalent to Vector{T} where T<:Real, and similarly for Vector{>:Int} (#20414).
- Much more accurate subtype and type intersection algorithms. Method sorting and identification of equivalent and ambiguous methods are improved as a result.

Language changes

"Inner constructor" syntax for parametric types is deprecated. For example, in this definition:
```
type Foo{T,S<:Real}
    x
    Foo(x) = new(x)
end
```
the syntax Foo(x) = new(x) actually defined a constructor for Foo{T,S}, i.e. the case where the type parameters are specified. For clarity, this definition now must be written as Foo{T,S}(x) where {T,S<:Real} = new(x) (#11310, #20308).
The keywords used to define types have changed (#19157, #20418).
- immutable changes to struct
- type changes to mutable struct
- abstract changes to abstract type ... end
- bitstype 32 Char changes to primitive type Char 32 end
In 0.6, immutable and type are still allowed as synonyms without a deprecation warning.
Multi-line and single-line nonstandard command literals have been added. A nonstandard command literal is like a nonstandard string literal, but the syntax uses backquotes (`) instead of double quotes, and the resulting macro called is suffixed with _cmd. For instance, the syntax q`xyz` is equivalent to @q_cmd "xyz" (#18644).
Nonstandard string and command literals can now be qualified with their module. For instance, Base.r"x" is now parsed as Base.@r_str "x". Previously, this syntax parsed as an implicit multiplication (#18690).
For every binary operator ⨳, a .⨳ b is now automatically equivalent to the broadcast call (⨳).(a, b). Hence, one no longer defines methods for .* etcetera. This also means that "dot operations" automatically fuse into a single loop, along with other dot calls f.(x) (#17623). Similarly for unary operators (#20249).
Newly defined methods are no longer callable from the same dynamic runtime scope they were defined in (#17057).
isa is now parsed as an infix operator with the same precedence as in (#19677).
@. is now parsed as @__dot__, and can be used to add dots to every function call, operator, and assignment in an expression (#20321).
The identifier _ can be assigned, but accessing its value is deprecated, allowing this syntax to be used in the future for discarding values (#9343, #18251, #20328).
The typealias keyword is deprecated, and should be replaced with Vector{T} = Array{T,1} or a const assignment (#20500).
Experimental feature: x^n for integer literals n (e.g. x^3 or x^-3) is now lowered to Base.literal_pow(^, x, Val{n}), to enable compile-time specialization for literal integer exponents (#20530, #20889).

Breaking changes

This section lists changes that do not have deprecation warnings.

readline, readlines and eachline return lines without line endings by default. You must use readline(s, chomp=false), etc. to get the old behavior where returned lines include trailing end-of-line character(s) (#19944).
Strings no longer have a .data field (as part of a significant performance improvement). Use Vector{UInt8}(str) to access a string as a byte array. However, allocating the Vector object has overhead. You can also use codeunit(str, i) to access the ith byte of a String. Use sizeof(str) instead of length(str.data), and pointer(str) instead of pointer(str.data) (#19449).
Operations between Float16 and Integers now return Float16 instead of Float32 (#17261).
Keyword arguments are processed left-to-right: if the same keyword is specified more than once, the rightmost occurrence takes precedence (#17785).
The lgamma(z) function now uses a different (more standard) branch cut for real(z) < 0, which differs from log(gamma(z)) by multiples of 2π in the imaginary part (#18330).
broadcast now handles tuples, and treats any argument that is not a tuple or an array as a "scalar" (#16986).
broadcast now produces a BitArray instead of Array{Bool} for functions yielding a boolean result. If you want Array{Bool}, use broadcast! or .= (#17623).
Broadcast A[I...] .= X with entirely scalar indices I is deprecated as its behavior will change in the future. Use A[I...] = X instead.
Operations like .+ and .* on Range objects are now generic broadcast calls (see above) and produce an Array. If you want a Range result, use + and *, etcetera (#17623).
broadcast now treats Ref (except for Ptr) arguments as 0-dimensional arrays (#18965).
broadcast now handles missing data (Nullables) allowing operations to be lifted over mixtures of Nullables and scalars, as if the Nullable were like an array with zero or one element (#16961, #19787).
The runtime now enforces when new method definitions can take effect (#17057). The flip-side of this is that new method definitions should now reliably actually take effect, and be called when evaluating new code (#265).
The array-scalar methods of /, \, *, +, and - now follow broadcast promotion rules. (Likewise for the now-deprecated array-scalar methods of div, mod, rem, &, |, and xor; see "Deprecated or removed" below.) (#19692).
broadcast!(f, A) now calls f() for each element of A, rather than doing fill!(A, f()) (#19722).
rmprocs now throws an exception if requested workers have not been completely removed before waitfor seconds. With a waitfor=0, rmprocs returns immediately without waiting for worker exits.
quadgk has been moved from Base into a separate package (#19741).
The Collections module has been removed, and all functions defined therein have been moved to the DataStructures package (#19800).
The RepString type has been moved to the LegacyStrings.jl package.
In macro calls with parentheses, e.g. @m(a=1), assignments are now parsed as = expressions, instead of as kw expressions (#7669).
When used as an infix operator, ~ is now parsed as a call to an ordinary operator with assignment precedence, instead of as a macro call (#20406).
(µ "micro" and ɛ "latin epsilon") are considered equivalent to the corresponding Greek characters in identifiers. \varepsilon now tab-completes to U+03B5 (greek small letter epsilon) (#19464).
retry now inputs the keyword arguments delays and check instead of n and max_delay. The previous functionality can be achieved setting delays to ExponentialBackOff (#19331).
transpose(::AbstractVector) now always returns a RowVector view of the input (which is a special 1×n-sized AbstractMatrix), not a Matrix, etc. In particular, for v::AbstractVector we now have (v.').' === v and v.' * v is a scalar (#19670).
Parametric types with "unspecified" parameters, such as Array, are now represented as UnionAll types instead of DataTypes (#18457).
Union types have two fields, a and b, instead of a single types field. The empty type Union{} is represented by a singleton of type TypeofBottom (#18457).
The type NTuple{N} now refers to tuples where every element has the same type (since it is shorthand for NTuple{N,T} where T). To get the old behavior of matching any tuple, use NTuple{N,Any} (#18457).
FloatRange has been replaced by StepRangeLen, and the internal representation of LinSpace has changed. Aside from changes in the internal field names, this leads to several differences in behavior (#18777):
- Both StepRangeLen and LinSpace can represent ranges of arbitrary object types---they are no longer limited to floating-point numbers.
- For ranges that produce Float64, Float32, or Float16 numbers, StepRangeLen can be used to produce values with little or no roundoff error due to internal arithmetic that is typically twice the precision of the output result.
- To take advantage of this precision, linspace(start, stop, len) now returns a range of type StepRangeLen rather than LinSpace when start and stop are FloatNN. LinSpace(start, stop, len) always returns a LinSpace.
- StepRangeLen(a, step, len) constructs an ordinary-precision range using the values and types of a and step as given, whereas range(a, step, len) will attempt to match inputs a::FloatNN and step::FloatNN to rationals and construct a StepRangeLen that internally uses twice-precision arithmetic. These two outcomes exhibit differences in both precision and speed.
A=>B expressions are now parsed as calls instead of using => as the expression head (#20327).
The count function no longer sums non-boolean values (#20404)
The generic getindex(::AbstractString, ::AbstractVector) method's signature has been tightened to getindex(::AbstractString, ::AbstractVector{<:Integer}). Consequently, indexing into AbstractStrings with non-AbstractVector{<:Integer} AbstractVectors now throws a MethodError in the absence of an appropriate specialization. (Previously such cases failed less explicitly with the exception of AbstractVector{Bool}, which now throws an ArgumentError noting that logical indexing into strings is not supported.) (#20248)
Bessel, Hankel, Airy, error, Dawson, eta, zeta, digamma, inverse digamma, trigamma, and polygamma special functions have been moved from Base to the SpecialFunctions.jl package (#20427). Note that airy, airyx and airyprime have been deprecated in favor of more specific functions (airyai, airybi, airyaiprime, airybiprimex, airyaix, airybix, airyaiprimex, airybiprimex) (#18050).
When a macro is called in the module in which that macro is defined, global variables in the macro are now correctly resolved in the macro definition environment. Breakage from this change commonly manifests as undefined variable errors that do not occur under 0.5. Fixing such breakage typically requires sprinkling additional escs in the offending macro (#15850).
write on an IOBuffer now returns a signed integer in order to be consistent with other buffers (#20609).
The <:Integer division fallback /(::Integer, ::Integer), which formerly inappropriately took precedence over other division methods for some mixed-integer-type division calls, has been removed (#19779).
@async, @spawn, @spawnat, @fetch and @fetchfrom no longer implicitly localize variables. Previously, the expression would be wrapped in an implicit let block (#19594).
parse no longer accepts IPv4 addresses including leading zeros, octal, or hexadecimal. Convert IPv4 addresses including octal or hexadecimal to decimal, and remove leading zeros in decimal addresses (#19811).
Closures shipped for remote execution via @spawn or remotecall now automatically serialize globals defined under Main. For details, please refer to the paragraph on "Global variables" under the "Parallel computing" chapter in the manual (#19594).
homedir now determines the user's home directory via libuv's uv_os_homedir, rather than from environment variables (#19636).
Workers now listen on an ephemeral port assigned by the OS. Previously workers would listen on the first free port available from 9009 (#21818).

Library improvements

A new @views macro was added to convert a whole expression or block of code to use views for all slices (#20164).
max, min, and related functions (minmax, maximum, minimum, extrema) now return NaN for NaN arguments (#12563).
oneunit(x) function to return a dimensionful version of one(x) (which is clarified to mean a dimensionless quantity if x is dimensionful) (#20268).
The chop and chomp functions now return a SubString (#18339).
Numbered stackframes printed in stacktraces can now be opened in an editor by entering the corresponding number in the REPL and pressing ^Q (#19680).
The REPL now supports something called prompt pasting (#17599). This activates when pasting text that starts with julia> into the REPL. In that case, only expressions starting with julia> are parsed, the rest are removed. This makes it possible to paste a chunk of code that has been copied from a REPL session without having to scrub away prompts and outputs. This can be disabled or enabled at will with Base.REPL.enable_promptpaste(::Bool).
The function print_with_color can now take a color represented by an integer between 0 and 255 inclusive as its first argument (#18473). For a number-to-color mapping, please refer to this chart. It is also possible to use numbers as colors in environment variables that customizes colors in the REPL. For example, to get orange warning messages, simply set ENV["JULIA_WARN_COLOR"] = 208. Please note that not all terminals support 256 colors.
The function print_with_color no longer prints text in bold by default (#18628). Instead, the function now take a keyword argument bold::Bool which determines whether to print in bold or not. On some terminals, printing a color in non bold results in slightly darker colors being printed than when printing in bold. Therefore, light versions of the colors are now supported. For the available colors see the help entry on print_with_color.
The default text style for REPL input and answers has been changed from bold to normal (#11250). They can be changed back to bold by setting the environment variables JULIA_INPUT_COLOR and JULIA_ANSWER_COLOR to "bold". For example, one way of doing this is adding ENV["JULIA_INPUT_COLOR"] = :bold and ENV["JULIA_ANSWER_COLOR"] = :bold to the .juliarc.jl file. See the manual section on customizing colors for more information.
The default color for info messages has been changed from blue to cyan (#18442), and for warning messages from red to yellow (#18453). This can be changed back to the original colors by setting the environment variables JULIA_INFO_COLOR to "blue" and JULIA_WARN_COLOR to "red".
Iteration utilities that wrap iterators and return other iterators (enumerate, zip, rest, countfrom, take, drop, cycle, repeated, product, flatten, partition) have been moved to the module Base.Iterators (#18839).
BitArrays can now be constructed from arbitrary iterables, in particular from generator expressions, e.g. BitArray(isodd(x) for x = 1:100) (#19018).
hcat, vcat, and hvcat now work with UniformScaling objects, so you can now do e.g. [A I] and it will concatenate an appropriately sized identity matrix (#19305).
New accumulate and accumulate! functions were added, which generalize cumsum and cumprod. Also known as a scan operation (#18931).
reshape now allows specifying one dimension with a Colon() (:) for the new shape, in which case that dimension's length will be computed such that its product with all the other dimensions is equal to the length of the original array (#19919).
The new to_indices function provides a uniform interface for index conversions, taking an array and a tuple of indices as arguments and returning a tuple of integers and/or arrays of supported scalar indices. It will throw an ArgumentError for any unsupported indices, and the returned arrays should be iterated over (and not indexed into) to support more efficient logical indexing (#19730).
- Using colons (:) to represent a collection of indices is deprecated. They now must be explicitly converted to a specialized array of integers with the to_indices function. As a result, the type of SubArrays that represent views over colon indices has changed.
- Logical indexing is now more efficient. Logical arrays are converted by to_indices to a lazy, iterable collection of indices that doesn't support indexing. A deprecation provides indexing support with O(n) lookup.
- The performance of indexing with CartesianIndexes is also improved in many situations.
A new titlecase function was added, to capitalize the first character of each word within a string (#19469).
any and all now always short-circuit, and mapreduce never short-circuits (#19543). That is, not every member of the input iterable will be visited if a true (in the case of any) or false (in the case of all) value is found, and mapreduce will visit all members of the iterable.
Additional methods for ones and zeros functions were added to support the same signature as the similar function (#19635).
count now has a count(itr) method equivalent to count(identity, itr) (#20403).
Methods for map and filter with Nullable arguments have been implemented; the semantics are as if the Nullable were a container with zero or one elements (#16961).
New @test_warn and @test_nowarn macros were added in the Base.Test module to test for the presence or absence of warning messages (#19903).
logging can now be used to redirect info, warn, and error messages either universally or on a per-module/function basis (#16213).
New function Base.invokelatest(f, args...) to call the latest version of a function in circumstances where an older version may be called instead (e.g. in a function calling eval) (#19784).
A new iszero(x) function was added, to quickly check whether x is zero (or is all zeros, for an array) (#19950).
notify now returns a count of tasks woken up (#19841).
A new nonstandard string literal raw"..." was added, for creating strings with no interpolation or unescaping (#19900).
A new Dates.Time type was added that supports representing the time of day with up to nanosecond resolution (#12274).
Raising one or negative one to a negative integer power formerly threw a DomainError. One raised to any negative integer power now yields one, negative one raised to any negative even integer power now yields one, and negative one raised to any negative odd integer power now yields negative one. Similarly, raising true to any negative integer power now yields true rather than throwing a DomainError (#18342).
A new @macroexpand macro was added as a convenient alternative to the macroexpand function (#18660).
invoke now supports keyword arguments (#20345).
A new ConjArray type was added, as a wrapper type for lazy complex conjugation of arrays. Currently, it is used by default for the new RowVector type only, and enforces that both transpose(vec) and ctranspose(vec) are views not copies (#20047).
rem now accepts a RoundingMode argument via rem(x, y, r::RoundingMode), yielding x - y*round(x/y, r) without intermediate rounding. In particular, rem(x, y, RoundNearest) yields a value in the interval [-abs(y)/2, abs(y)/2]), which corresponds to the IEE754 remainder function. Similarly, rem2pi(x, r::RoundingMode) now exists as well, yielding rem(x, 2pi, r::RoundingMode) but with greater accuracy (#10946).
map[!] and broadcast[!] now have dedicated methods for sparse/structured vectors/matrices. Specifically, map[!] and broadcast[!] over combinations including one or more SparseVector, SparseMatrixCSC, Diagonal, Bidiagonal, Tridiagonal, or SymTridiagonal, and any number of broadcast scalars, Vectors, or Matrixs, now efficiently yield SparseVectors or SparseMatrixs as appropriate (#19239, #19371, #19518, #19438, #19690, #19724, #19926, #19934, #20009).
The operators ! and ∘ (\circ<tab> at the REPL and in most code editors) now respectively perform predicate function negation and function composition. For example, map(!iszero, (0, 1)) is now equivalent to map(x -> !iszero(x), (0, 1)) and map(uppercase ∘ hex, 250:255) is now equivalent to map(x -> uppercase(hex(x)), 250:255) (#17155).
enumerate now supports the two-argument form enumerate(::IndexStyle, iterable). This form allows specification of the returned indices' style. For example, enumerate(IndexLinear, iterable) yields linear indices and enumerate(IndexCartesian, iterable) yields cartesian indices (#16378).

Compiler/Runtime improvements

ccall is now implemented as a macro, removing the need for special code-generator support for Intrinsics (#18754).
ccall gained limited support for a llvmcall calling-convention. This can replace many uses of llvmcall with a simpler, shorter declaration (#18754).
All Intrinsics are now Builtin functions instead and have proper error checking and fall-back static compilation support (#18754).

Deprecated or removed

ipermutedims(A::AbstractArray, p) has been deprecated in favor of permutedims(A, invperm(p)) (#18891).
Linear indexing is now only supported when there is exactly one non-cartesian index provided. Allowing a trailing index at dimension d to linearly access the higher dimensions from array A (beyond size(A, d)) has been deprecated as a stricter constraint during bounds checking. Instead, reshape the array such that its dimensionality matches the number of indices (#20079).
Multimedia.@textmime "mime" has been deprecated. Instead define Multimedia.istextmime(::MIME"mime") = true (#18441).
isdefined(a::Array, i::Int) has been deprecated in favor of isassigned (#18346).
The three-argument SubArray constructor (which accepts dims::Tuple as its third argument) has been deprecated in favor of the two-argument equivalent (the dims::Tuple argument being superfluous) (#19259).
is has been deprecated in favor of === (which used to be an alias for is) (#17758).
Ambiguous methods for addition and subtraction between UniformScalings and Numbers, for example (+)(J::UniformScaling, x::Number), have been deprecated in favor of unambiguous, explicit equivalents, for example J.λ + x (#17607).
num and den have been deprecated in favor of numerator and denominator respectively (#19233,#19246).
delete!(ENV::EnvDict, k::AbstractString, def) has been deprecated in favor of pop!(ENV, k, def). Be aware that pop! returns k or def, whereas delete! returns ENV or def (#18012).
infix operator $ has been deprecated in favor of infix ⊻ or function xor (#18977).
The single-argument form of write (write(x), with implicit STDOUT output stream), has been deprecated in favor of the explicit equivalent write(STDOUT, x) (#17654).
Dates.recur has been deprecated in favor of filter (#19288)
A number of ambiguous convert operations between Numbers (especially Reals) and Date, DateTime, and Period types have been deprecated in favor of unambiguous convert and explicit constructor calls. Additionally, ambiguous colon construction of <:Period ranges without step specification, for example Dates.Hour(1):Dates.Hour(2), has been deprecated in favor of such construction including step specification, for example Dates.Hour(1):Dates.Hour(1):Dates.Hour(2) (#19920).
cummin and cummax have been deprecated in favor of accumulate (#18931).
The Array constructor syntax Array(T, dims...) has been deprecated in favor of the forms Array{T,N}(dims...) (where N is known, or particularly Vector{T}(dims...) for N = 1 and Matrix{T}(dims...) for N = 2), and Array{T}(dims...) (where N is not known). Likewise for SharedArrays (#19989).
sumabs and sumabs2 have been deprecated in favor of sum(abs, x) and sum(abs2, x), respectively. maxabs and minabs have similarly been deprecated in favor of maximum(abs, x) and minimum(abs, x). Likewise for the in-place counterparts of these functions (#19598).
The array-reducing form of isinteger (isinteger(x::AbstractArray)) has been deprecated in favor of all(isinteger, x) (#19925).
produce, consume and iteration over a Task object have been deprecated in favor of using Channels for inter-task communication (#19841).
The negate keyword has been deprecated from all functions in the Dates adjuster API (adjust, tonext, toprev, Date, Time, and DateTime). Instead use predicate function negation via the ! operator (see Library Improvements) (#20213).
@test_approx_eq x y has been deprecated in favor of @test isapprox(x,y) or @test x ≈ y (#4615).
Matrix() and Matrix{T}() have been deprecated in favor of the explicit forms Matrix(0, 0) and Matrix{T}(0, 0) (#20330).
Vectorized functions have been deprecated in favor of dot syntax (#17302, #17265, #18558, #19711, #19712, #19791, #19802, #19931, #20543, #20228).
All methods of character predicates (isalnum, isalpha, iscntrl, isdigit, isnumber, isgraph, islower, isprint, ispunct, isspace, isupper, isxdigit) that accept AbstractStrings have been deprecated in favor of all. For example, isnumber("123") should now be expressed all(isnumber, "123") (#20342).
A few names related to indexing traits have been changed: LinearIndexing and linearindexing have been deprecated in favor of IndexStyle. LinearFast has been deprecated in favor of IndexLinear, and LinearSlow has been deprecated in favor of IndexCartesian (#16378).
The two-argument forms of map (map!(f, A)) and asyncmap! (asyncmap!(f, A)) have been deprecated in anticipation of future semantic changes (#19721).
unsafe_wrap(String, ...) has been deprecated in favor of unsafe_string (#19449).
zeros and ones methods accepting an element type as the first argument and an array as the second argument, for example zeros(Float64, [1, 2, 3]), have been deprecated in favor of equivalent methods with the second argument instead the size of the array, for example zeros(Float64, size([1, 2, 3])) (#21183).
Base.promote_eltype_op has been deprecated (#19669, #19814, #19937).
isimag has been deprecated (#19949).
The tuple-of-types form of invoke, invoke(f, (types...), ...), has been deprecated in favor of the tuple-type form invoke(f, Tuple{types...}, ...) (#18444).
Base._promote_array_type has been deprecated (#19766).
broadcast_zpreserving has been deprecated (#19533, #19720).
Methods allowing indexing of tuples by AbstractArrays with more than one dimension have been deprecated. (Indexing a tuple by such a higher-dimensional AbstractArray should yield a tuple with more than one dimension, but tuples are one-dimensional.) (#19737).
@test_approx_eq a b has been deprecated in favor of @test a ≈ b (or, equivalently, @test ≈(a, b) or @test isapprox(a, b)). @test_approx_eq_eps has been deprecated in favor of new @test syntax: @test now supports the syntax @test f(args...) key=val ... for @test f(args..., key=val...). This syntax allows, for example, writing @test a ≈ b atol=c in place of @test ≈(a, b, atol=c) (and hence @test_approx_eq_eps a b c) (#19901).
takebuf_array has been deprecated in favor of take!, and takebuf_string(x) has been deprecated in favor of String(take!(x)) (#19088).
convert methods from Diagonal and Bidiagonal to subtypes of AbstractTriangular have been deprecated (#17723).
Base.LinAlg.arithtype has been deprecated. If you were using arithtype within a promote_op call, instead use promote_op(Base.LinAlg.matprod, Ts...). Otherwise, consider defining equivalent functionality locally (#18218).
Special characters (#{}()[]<>|&*?~;) should now be quoted in commands. For example, `export FOO=1\;` should replace `export FOO=1;` and `cd $dir '&&' $thingie` should replace `cd $dir && $thingie` (#19786).
Zero-argument Channel constructors (Channel(), Channel{T}()) have been deprecated in favor of equivalents accepting an explicit Channel size (Channel(2), Channel{T}(2)) (#18832).
The zero-argument constructor MersenneTwister() has been deprecated in favor of the explicit MersenneTwister(0) (#16984).
Base.promote_type(op::Type, Ts::Type...) has been removed as part of an overhaul of broadcast's promotion mechanism. If you need the functionality of that Base.promote_type method, consider defining it locally via Core.Inference.return_type(op, Tuple{Ts...}) (#18642).
bitbroadcast has been deprecated in favor of broadcast, which now produces a BitArray instead of Array{Bool} for functions yielding a boolean result (#19771).
To complete the deprecation of histogram-related functions, midpoints has been deprecated. Instead use the StatsBase.jl package's midpoints function (#20058).
Passing a type argument to LibGit2.cat has been deprecated in favor of a simpler, two-argument method for LibGit2.cat (#20435).
The LibGit2.owner function for finding the repository which owns a given Git object has been deprecated in favor of LibGit2.repository (#20135).
The LibGit2.GitAnyObject type has been renamed to LibGit2.GitUnknownObject to clarify its intent (#19935).
The LibGit2.GitOid type has been renamed to LibGit2.GitHash for clarity (#19878).
Finalizing LibGit2 objects with finalize has been deprecated in favor of using close (#19660).
Parsing string dates from a Dates.DateFormat object has been deprecated as part of a larger effort toward faster, more extensible date parsing (#20952).
linspace and logspace now require an explicit number of elements to be supplied rather than defaulting to 50.
similar(::Associative) has been deprecated in favor of empty(::Associative), and similar(::Associative, ::Pair{K, V}) has been deprecated in favour of empty(::Associative, K, V) (#24390).

Command-line option changes

In polly builds (USE_POLLY := 1), the new flag --polly={yes|no} controls whether @polly declarations are respected. (With --polly=no, @polly declarations are ignored.) This flag is also available in non-polly builds (USE_POLLY := 0), but has no effect (#18159).

Julia v0.5.0 Release Notes

New language features

Generator expressions: f(i) for i in 1:n (#4470). This returns an iterator that computes the specified values on demand. This is useful for computing, e.g. sum(f(i) for i in 1:n) without creating an intermediate array of values.
Generators and comprehensions support filtering using if (#550) and nested iteration using multiple for keywords (#4867).
Fused broadcasting syntax: f.(args...) is equivalent to broadcast(f, args...) (#15032), and nested f.(g.(args...)) calls are fused into a single broadcast loop (#17300). Similarly, the syntax x .= ... is equivalent to a broadcast!(identity, x, ...) call and fuses with nested "dot" calls; also, x .+= y and similar is now equivalent to x .= x .+ y, rather than x = x .+ y (#17510).
Macro expander functions are now generic, so macros can have multiple definitions (e.g. for different numbers of arguments, or optional arguments) (#8846, #9627). However note that the argument types refer to the syntax tree representation, and not to the types of run time values.
Varargs functions like foo{T}(x::T...) may now restrict the number of such arguments using foo{T,N}(x::Vararg{T,N}) (#11242).
x ∈ X is now a synonym for x in X in for loops and comprehensions, as it already was in comparisons (#13824).
The PROGRAM_FILE global is now available for determining the name of the running script (#14114).
The syntax x.:sym (e.g. Base.:+) is now supported, while using x.(:sym) or x.(i) for field access are deprecated in favor of getfield (#15032).
Function return type syntax function f()::T has been added (#1090). Values returned from a function with such a declaration will be converted to the specified type T.
Many more operators now support . prefixes (e.g. .≤) (#17393). However, users are discouraged from overloading these, since they are mainly parsed in order to implement backwards compatibility with planned automatic broadcasting of dot operators in Julia 0.6 (#16285). Explicitly qualified operator names like Base.≤ should now use Base.:≤ (prefixed by @compat if you need 0.4 compatibility via the Compat package).
User-extensible bounds check elimination is now possible with the new @boundscheck macro (#14474). This macro marks bounds checking code blocks, which the compiler may remove when encountered inside an @inbounds call.

Experimental language features

Support for multi-threading. Loops with independent iterations can be easily parallelized with the Threads.@threads macro.
Support for arrays with indexing starting at values different from 1. The array types are expected to be defined in packages, but now Julia provides an API for writing generic algorithms for arbitrary indexing schemes (#16260).

Language changes

Each function and closure now has its own type. The captured variables of a closure are fields of its type. Function is now an abstract type, and is the default supertype of functions and closures. All functions, including anonymous functions, are generic and support all features (e.g. keyword arguments). Instead of adding methods to call, methods are added by type using the syntax (::ftype)(...) = .... call is deprecated (#13412). A significant result of this language change is that higher order functions can be specialized on their function arguments, leading to much faster functional programming, typically as fast as if function arguments were manually inlined. See below for details.
Square brackets and commas (e.g. [x, y]) no longer concatenate arrays, and always simply construct a vector of the provided values. If x and y are arrays, [x, y] will be an array of arrays (#3737, #2488, #8599).
using and import are now case-sensitive even on case-insensitive filesystems (common on Mac and Windows) (#13542).
Relational algebra symbols are now allowed as infix operators (#8036): ⨝, ⟕, ⟖, ⟗ for joins and ▷ for anti-join.
A warning is always given when a method is overwritten; previously, this was done only when the new and old definitions were in separate modules (#14759).
The if keyword cannot be followed immediately by a line break (#15763).
Juxtaposition of numeric literals ending in . (e.g. 1.x) is no longer allowed (#15731).
The built-in NTuple type has been removed; NTuple{N,T} is now implemented internally as Tuple{Vararg{T,N}} (#11242).
Use of the syntax x::T to declare the type of a local variable is deprecated. In the future this will always mean type assertion, and declarations should use local x::T instead (#16071). When x is global, x::T = ... and global x::T used to mean type assertion, but this syntax is now reserved for type declaration (#964).
Dictionary comprehension syntax [ a=>b for x in y ] is deprecated. Use Dict(a=>b for x in y) instead (#16510).
Parentheses are no longer allowed around iteration specifications, e.g. for (i = 1:n) (#17668).

Breaking changes

This section lists changes that do not have deprecation warnings.

All dimensions indexed by scalars are now dropped, whereas previously only trailing scalar dimensions would be omitted from the result (#13612). This is a very major behavioral change, but should cause obvious failures. To retain a dimension sliced with a scalar i slice with i:i instead.
The assignment operations .+=, .*= and so on now generate calls to broadcast! on the left-hand side (or call to view(a, ...) on the left-hand side if the latter is an indexing expression, e.g. a[...]). This means that they will fail if the left-hand side is immutable (or does not support view), and will otherwise change the left-hand side in-place (#17510, #17546).
Method ambiguities no longer generate warnings when files are loaded, nor do they dispatch to an arbitrarily-chosen method; instead, a call that cannot be resolved to a single method results in a MethodError at run time, rather than the previous definition-time warning (#6190).
Array comprehensions preserve the dimensions of the input ranges. For example, [2x for x in A] will have the same dimensions as A (#16622).
The result type of an array comprehension depends only on the types of elements computed, instead of using type inference (#7258). If the result is empty, then type inference is still used to determine the element type.
reshape is now defined to always share data with the original array. If a reshaped copy is needed, use copy(reshape(a)) or copy! to a new array of the desired shape (#4211).
mapslices now re-uses temporary storage. Recipient functions that expect input slices to be persistent should copy data to other storage (#17266). All usages of mapslices should be carefully audited since this change can cause silent, incorrect behavior, rather than failing noisily.
Local variables and arguments are represented in lowered code as numbered Slot objects instead of as symbols (#15609).
The information that used to be in the ast field of the LambdaStaticData type is now divided among the fields code, slotnames, slottypes, slotflags, gensymtypes, rettype, nargs, and isva in the LambdaInfo type (#15609).
A <: B is parsed as Expr(:(<:), :A, :B) in all cases (#9503). This also applies to the >: operator.
Simple 2-argument comparisons like A < B are parsed as calls instead of using the :comparison expression type (#15524). The :comparison expression type is still produced in ASTs when comparisons are chained (e.g. A < B ≤ C).
map on a dictionary now expects a function that expects and returns a Pair. The result is now another dictionary instead of an array (#16622).
Bit shift operations (i.e. <<, >>, and >>>) now handle negative shift counts differently: Negative counts are interpreted as shifts in the opposite direction. For example, 4 >> -1 == 4 << +1 == 8. Previously, negative counts would implicitly overflow to large positive counts, always yielding either 0 or -1.

Library improvements

Strings (#16107):
- The UTF8String and ASCIIString types have been merged into a single String type (#16058). Use isascii(s) to check whether a string contains only ASCII characters. The ascii(s) function now converts s to String, raising an ArgumentError exception if s is not pure ASCII.
- The UTF16String and UTF32String types and corresponding utf16 and utf32 converter functions have been removed from the standard library. If you need these types, they have been moved to the LegacyStrings.jl package. In the future, more robust Unicode string support will be provided by the StringEncodings.jl package. If you only need these types to call wide string APIs (UTF-16 on Windows, UTF-32 on UNIX), consider using the new transcode function (see below) or the Cwstring type as a ccall argument type, which also ensures correct NUL termination of string data.
- A transcode(T, src) function is now exported for converting data between UTF-xx Unicode encodings (#17323).
- The basic string construction routines are now string(args...), String(s), unsafe_string(ptr) (formerly bytestring(ptr)), and unsafe_wrap(String, ptr) (formerly pointer_to_string) (#16731).
- Comparisons between Chars and Integers are now deprecated (#16024): 'x' == 120 now produces a warning but still evaluates to true. In the future it may evaluate to false or the comparison may be an error. To compare characters with integers you should either convert the integer to a character value or convert the character to the corresponding code point first: e.g. 'x' == Char(120) or Int('x') == 120. The former is usually preferable.
- Support for Unicode 9 (#17402).
Arrays and linear algebra:
- Dimensions indexed by multidimensional arrays add dimensions. More generally, the dimensionality of the result is the sum of the dimensionalities of the indices (#15431).
- New normalize and normalize! convenience functions for normalizing vectors (#13681).
- QR matrix factorization:
  - New method for generic QR with column pivoting (#13480).
  - New method for polar decompositions of AbstractVectors (#13681).
- A new SparseVector type allows for one-dimensional sparse arrays. Slicing and reshaping sparse matrices now return vectors when appropriate. The sparsevec function returns a one-dimensional sparse vector instead of a one-column sparse matrix. The SparseMatrix module has been renamed to SparseArrays (#13440).
- Rank one update and downdate functions, lowrankupdate, lowrankupdate!, lowrankdowndate, and lowrankdowndate!, have been introduced for dense Cholesky factorizations (#14243, #14424).
- All sparse methods now retain provided numerical zeros as structural nonzeros; to drop numerical zeros, use dropzeros! (#14798, #15242).
- setindex! methods for sparse matrices and vectors no longer purge allocated entries on zero assignment. To drop stored entries from sparse matrices and vectors, use Base.SparseArrays.dropstored! (#17404).
- Concatenating dense and sparse matrices now returns a sparse matrix (#15172).
Files and I/O:
- The open function now respects umask on UNIX when creating files (#16466, #16502).
- A new function walkdir() returns an iterator that walks the tree of a directory (#8814, #13707).
```
for (root, dirs, files) in walkdir(expanduser("~/.julia/v0.5/Plots/src"))
    println("$(length(files)) \t files in $root")
end
19    files in /Users/me/.julia/v0.5/Plots/src
15    files in /Users/me/.julia/v0.5/Plots/src/backends
4     files in /Users/me/.julia/v0.5/Plots/src/deprecated
```
- A new function chown() changes the ownership of files (#15007).
- Display properties can now be passed among output functions (e.g. show) using an IOContext object (#13825).
- Cmd(cmd; ...) now accepts new Windows-specific options windows_verbatim (to alter Windows command-line generation) and windows_hide (to suppress creation of new console windows) (#13780).
- There is now a default no-op flush(io) function for all IO types (#16403).
Parallel computing:
- pmap keyword arguments err_retry=true and err_stop=false are deprecated. Action to be taken on errors can be specified via the on_error keyword argument. Retry is specified via retry_n, retry_on and retry_max_delay (#15409, #15975, #16663).
- The functions remotecall, remotecall_fetch, and remotecall_wait now have the function argument as the first argument to allow for do-block syntax (#13338).
Statistics:
- Improve performance of quantile (#14413).
- extrema can now operate over a region (#15550).
- cov and cor don't use keyword arguments anymore and are therefore now type stable (#13465).
- Histogram functionality has been deprecated in Base. Use the StatsBase.jl package instead (#6842, #16450).
Testing:
- The Base.Test module now has a @testset feature to bundle tests together and delay throwing an error until the end (#13062).
- The new features are mirrored in the BaseTestNext.jl package for users who would like to use the new functionality on Julia v0.4.
- The BaseTestDeprecated.jl package provides the old-style handler functionality, for compatibility with code that needs to support both Julia v0.4 and v0.5.
Package management:
- The package system (Pkg) is now based on the libgit2 library, rather than running the git program, increasing performance (especially on Windows) (#11196).
- Package-development functions like Pkg.tag and Pkg.publish have been moved to an external PkgDev package (#13387).
- Updating only a subset of the packages is now supported, e.g. Pkg.update("Example") (#17132).
Miscellanous:
- Prime number related functions have been moved from Base to the Primes.jl package (#16481).
- Most of the combinatorics functions have been moved from Base to the Combinatorics.jl package (#13897).
- New foreach function for calling a function on every element of a collection when the results are not needed (#13774). Compared to map(f, v), which allocates and returns a result array, foreach(f, v) calls f on each element of v, returning nothing.
- The new Base.StackTraces module makes stack traces easier to use programmatically (#14469).
- The libjulia library is now properly versioned and installed to the public <prefix>/lib directory, instead of the private <prefix>/lib/julia directory (#16362).
- System reflection is now more consistently exposed from Sys and not Base (e.g. constants such as WORD_SIZE and CPU_CORES). OS_NAME has been replaced by Sys.KERNEL and always reports the name of the kernel (as reported by uname). The @windows_only and @osx family of macros have been replaced with functions such as is_windows() and is_apple(). There is now also a @static macro that will evaluate the condition of an if-statement at compile time, for when a static branch is required (#16219).
- Date and DateTime values can now be rounded to a specified resolution (e.g., 1 month or 15 minutes) with floor, ceil, and round (#17037).

Compiler/Runtime improvements

Machine SIMD types can be represented in Julia as a homogeneous tuple of VecElement (#15244).
The performance of higher-order and anonymous functions has been greatly improved. For example, map(x->2x, A) performs as well as 2.*A(#13412).
On windows, a DLL of standard library code is now precompiled and used by default, improving startup time (#16953).
LLVM has been upgraded to version 3.7.1, improving the quality of generated code and debug info. However compile times may be slightly longer (#14623).

New architectures

This release greatly improves support for ARM, and introduces support for Power.

ARM: #14194, #14519, #16645, #16621
Power: #16455, #16404

Deprecated or removed

The following function names have been simplified and unified (#13232):
- get_bigfloat_precision -> precision(BigFloat)
- set_bigfloat_precision -> setprecision
- with_bigfloat_precision -> setprecision
- get_rounding -> rounding
- set_rounding -> setrounding
- with_rounding -> setrounding
The method A_ldiv_B!(SparseMatrixCSC, StridedVecOrMat) has been deprecated in favor of versions that require the matrix to be in factored form (#13496).
chol(A,Val{:U/:L}) has been deprecated in favor of chol(A) (#13680).
rem1(x,y) is discontinued due to inconsistency for x==0. Use mod1 instead (#14140).
The FS module has been renamed to Filesystem. Calling the functions isreadable, iswritable, and isexecutable on filesystem paths has been deprecated (#12819).
RemoteRef has been deprecated in favor of RemoteChannel (#14458).
super has been renamed to supertype (#14335).
parseip(str) has been deprecated in favor of parse(IPAddr, str) (#14676).
readall has been renamed to readstring, and readbytes has been renamed to read (#14608, #14660).
fieldoffsets(x) has been deprecated in favor of calling fieldoffset(x, i) on each field (#14777).
issym is deprecated in favor of issymmetric to match similar functions (ishermitian, ...) (#15192).
scale is deprecated in favor of either α*A, Diagonal(x)*A, or A*Diagonal(x) (#15258).
istext has been renamed to istextmime (#12872, #15708).
"Functor" types are no longer necessary and have been deprecated (#15804). To maintain performance on older versions of Julia the Compat.jl package provides a @functorize macro.
bitunpack(B) and bitpack(A) have been deprecated in favor of Array(B) and BitArray(A), respectively (#16010).
xdump is removed, and dump now simply shows the full representation of a value. dump should not be overloaded, since it is for examining concrete structure (#4163).
sprandbool has been deprecated in favor of sprand(Bool, ...) or sprand(rng, Bool, ...) (#11688, #16098).
The lowercase symbol function has been deprecated in favor of the Symbol constructor (#16154).
writemime is deprecated, and output methods specifying a MIME type are now methods of show (#14052).
BLAS utility functions blas_set_num_threads, blas_vendor, and check_blas have been moved to the BLAS module as BLAS.set_num_threads, BLAS.vendor, and BLAS.check (#10548, #16600).
print_escaped has been renamed to escape_string, print_unescaped has been renamed to unescape_string, and print_joined has been renamed to join (#16603).
pointer_to_string has been renamed to unsafe_wrap(String, ...), and pointer_to_array has been renamed to unsafe_wrap(Array, ...) (#16731).
sub and slice have been deprecated in favor of view (#16972).
Sparse matrix functions etree, ereach, csc_permute, and symperm have been moved to the SuiteSparse.jl package (#12231, #17033).
The no-op transpose fallback for non-numeric arrays has been deprecated. Consider introducing suitable transpose methods or calling permutedims(x, (2, 1)) for matrices and reshape(x, 1, length(x)) for vectors. (#13171, #17075, #17374).
The following macros have been deprecated (#16219):
- @windows is deprecated in favor of is_windows()
- @unix is deprecated in favor of is_unix()
- @osx is deprecated in favor of is_apple()
- @linux is deprecated in favor of is_linux()
- @windows_only is deprecated in favor of if is_windows()
- @unix_only is deprecated in favor of if is_unix()
- @osx_only is deprecated in favor of if is_apple()
- @linux_only is deprecated in favor of if is_linux()
- NOTE: Using @static could be useful/necessary when used in a function's local scope. See details at the section entitled Handling Operating System Variation in the manual.

Command-line option changes

The -F flag to load ~/.juliarc has been deprecated in favor of --startup-file=yes (#9482).
The -f and --no-startup flags to disable loading of ~/.juliarc have been deprecated in favor of --startup-file=no (#9482).
The -P and --post-boot flags for evaluating an expression in "interactive mode" have been deprecated in favor of -i -e (#16854).
The --no-history-file flag to disable loading of ~/.julia_history has been deprecated in favor of --history-file=no (#9482).

Language tooling improvements

The Julia debugger makes its debut with this release. Install it with Pkg.add("Gallium"), and the documentation should get you going. The JuliaCon talk on Gallium shows off various features of the debugger.
The Juno IDE has matured significantly, and now also includes support for plotting and debugging.
Cxx.jl provides a convenient FFI for calling C++ code from Julia.

Julia v0.4.0 Release Notes

New language features

Function call overloading: for arbitrary objects x (not of type Function), x(...) is transformed into call(x, ...), and call can be overloaded as desired. Constructors are now a special case of this mechanism, which allows e.g. constructors for abstract types. T(...) falls back to convert(T, x), so all convert methods implicitly define a constructor (#8712, #2403).
Unicode version 8 is now supported for identifiers etcetera (#7917, #12031).
Type parameters now permit any isbits type, not just Int and Bool (#6081).
Keyword argument names can be computed, using syntax such as f(; symbol => val) (#7704).
The syntax @generated function enables generation of specialized methods based on argument types. At compile time, the function is called with its arguments bound to their types instead of to their values. The function then returns an expression forming the body of the function to be called at run time (#7311).
Documentation system for functions, methods, types and macros in packages and user code (#8791).
The syntax function foo end can be used to introduce a generic function without yet adding any methods (#8283).
Incremental precompilation of modules: call VERSION >= v"0.4.0-dev+6521" && __precompile__() at the top of a module file to automatically precompile it when it is imported (#12491), or manually run Base.compilecache(modulename). The resulting precompiled .ji file is saved in ~/.julia/lib/v0.4 (#8745).
- See manual section on Module initialization and precompilation (under Modules) for details and errata. In particular, to be safely precompilable a module may need an __init__ function to separate code that must be executed at runtime rather than precompile time. Modules that are not precompilable should call __precompile__(false).
- The precompiled .ji file includes a list of dependencies (modules and files that were imported/included at precompile-time), and the module is automatically recompiled upon import when any of its dependencies have changed. Explicit dependencies on other files can be declared with include_dependency(path) (#12458).
- New option --output-incremental={yes|no} added to invoke the equivalent of Base.compilecache from the command line.
The syntax new{parameters...}(...) can be used in constructors to specify parameters for the type to be constructed (#8135).
++ is now parsed as an infix operator, but does not yet have a default definition (#11030, #11686).
Support for inter-task communication using Channels (#12264). See https://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computing/#channels for details.
RemoteRefs now point to remote channels. The remote channels can be of length greater than 1. Default continues to be of length 1 (#12385). See https://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/parallel-computing/#remoterefs-and-abstractchannels for details.
@__LINE__ special macro now available to reflect invocation source line number (#12727).

Language changes

Tuple types are now written as Tuple{A, B} instead of as (A, B). Tuples of bits types are inlined into structs and arrays, like other immutable types. ... now does splatting inside parentheses, instead of constructing a variadic tuple type (#10380). Variadic tuple types are written as Tuple{Vararg{T}}.
Using [x,y] to concatenate arrays is deprecated, and in the future will construct a vector of x and y instead (#3737, #2488, #8599).
Significant improvements to ccall and cfunction
- As a safer alternative to creating pointers (Ptr), the managed reference type Ref has been added. A Ref points to the data contained by a value in an abstract sense, and in a way that is GC-safe. For example, Ref(2) points to a storage location that contains the integer 2, and Ref(array,3) points to the third element of an array. A Ref can be automatically converted to a native pointer when passed to a ccall.
- When passing a by-reference argument to ccall, you can declare the argument type to be Ref{T} instead of Ptr{T}, and just pass x instead of &x.
- ccall is now lowered to call unsafe_convert(T, cconvert(T, x)) on each argument. cconvert falls back to convert, but can be used to convert an argument to an arbitrarily-different representation more suitable for passing to C. unsafe_convert then handles conversions to Ptr.
- ccall and cfunction now support correctly passing and returning structs, following the platform ABI (assuming the C types are mirrored accurately in Julia).
- cfunction arguments of struct-like Julia types are now passed by value. If Ref{T} is used as a cfunction argument type, it will look up the method applicable to T, but pass the argument by reference (as Julia functions usually do). However, this should only be used for objects allocated by Julia and for isbits types.
convert(Ptr,x) is deprecated for most types, replaced by unsafe_convert. You can still convert between pointer types, and between pointers and Int or UInt.
Module __init__ methods no longer swallow thrown exceptions; they now throw an InitError wrapping the thrown exception (#12576).
Unsigned BigInt literal syntax has been removed (#11105). Unsigned literals larger than UInt128 now throw a syntax error.
error(::Exception) and error(::Type{Exception}) have been deprecated in favor of using an explicit throw (#9690).
Uint etcetera are renamed to UInt (#8905).
String is renamed to AbstractString (#8872).
FloatingPoint is renamed to AbstractFloat (#12162).
None is deprecated; use Union{} instead (#8423).
Nothing (the type of nothing) is renamed to Void (#8423).
Arrays can be constructed with the syntax Array{T}(m,n) (#3214, #10075).
Dict literal syntax [a=>b,c=>d] is replaced by Dict(a=>b,c=>d), {a=>b} is replaced by Dict{Any,Any}(a=>b), and (K=>V)[...] is replaced by Dict{K,V}(...). The new syntax has many advantages: all of its components are first-class, it generalizes to other types of containers, it is easier to guess how to specify key and value types, and the syntaxes for empty and pre-populated dicts are synchronized. As part of this change, => is parsed as a normal operator, and Base defines it to construct Pair objects (#6739).
Char is no longer a subtype of Integer (#8816). Char now supports a more limited set of operations with Integer types:
- comparison / equality
- Char + Int = Char
- Char - Char = Int
round rounds to the nearest integer using the default rounding mode, which is ties-to-even by default (#8750).
A custom triple-quoted string like x"""...""" no longer invokes an x_mstr macro. Instead, the string is first unindented and then x_str is invoked, as if the string had been single-quoted (#10228).
Colons (:) within indexing expressions are no longer lowered to the range 1:end. Instead, the : identifier is passed directly. Custom array types that implement getindex or setindex! methods must also extend those methods to support arguments of type Colon (#10331).
Unions of types should now be written with curly braces instead of parentheses, i.e. Union{Type1, Type2} instead of Union(Type1, Type2) (#11432).
The keyword local is no longer allowed in global scope. Use let instead of begin to create a new scope from the top level (#7234, #10472).
Triple-quoted strings no longer treat tabs as 8 spaces. Instead, the longest common prefix of spaces and tabs is removed.
global x in a nested scope is now a syntax error if x is local to the enclosing scope (#7264/#11985).
The default importall Base.Operators is deprecated, and relying on it will give a warning (#8113).
remotecall_fetch and fetch now rethrow any uncaught remote exception locally as a RemoteException. Previously they would return the remote exception object. The worker pid, remote exception and remote backtrace are available in the thrown RemoteException.
If any of the enclosed async operations in a @sync block throw exceptions, they are now collected in a CompositeException and the CompositeException thrown.

Command line option changes

The -i option now forces the REPL to run after loading the specified script (if any) (#11347).
New option --handle-signals={yes|no} to disable Julia's signal handlers.
The --depwarn={yes|no|error} option enables/disables syntax and method deprecation warnings, or turns them into errors (#9294).
Some command line options are slated for deprecation / removal
- -f, --no-startup Don't load ~/.juliarc (deprecated, use --startup-file=no)
- -F Load ~/.juliarc (deprecated, use --startup-file=yes)`
- -P, --post-boot <expr> Evaluate , but don't disable interactive mode (deprecated, use -i -e instead)
- --no-history-file Don't load history file (deprecated, use --history-file=no)

Compiler/Runtime improvements

Functions may be annotated with metadata (:meta expressions) to be used by the compiler (#8297).
@inline before a function definition forces the compiler to inline the function (#8297).
Loads from heap-allocated immutables are hoisted out of loops in more cases (#8867).
Accessing fields that are always initialized no longer produces undefined checks (#8827).
New generational garbage collector which greatly reduces GC overhead for many commmon workloads (#5227).

Library improvements

Build with USE_GPL_LIBS=0 to exclude all GPL libraries and code (#10870).
Linear algebra
- The LinAlg module is now exported.
- sparse(A) now takes any AbstractMatrix A as an argument (#10031).
- Factorization API is now type-stable; functions dispatch on Val{false} or Val{true} instead of a boolean value (#9575).
- Added generic Cholesky factorization, and the Cholesky factorization is now parametrized by the matrix type (#7236).
- Sparse cholfact and ldltfact functions now accept a perm keyword for user-provided permutations and a shift keyword to factorize a shifted matrix (#10844).
- New svds function for the sparse truncated SVD (#9425).
- Symmetric and Hermitian immutables are now parametrized by the matrix type (#7992).
- New ordschur and ordschur! functions for sorting a Schur factorization by the eigenvalues (#8467,#9701).
- Givens type doesn't have a size anymore and is no longer a subtype of AbstractMatrix (#8660).
- Large speedup in sparse \ and splitting of Cholesky and LDLᵀ factorizations into cholfact and ldltfact (#10117).
- Add sparse least squares to \ by adding qrfact for sparse matrices based on the SPQR library (#10180).
- Split Triangular type into UpperTriangular, LowerTriangular, UnitUpperTriagular and UnitLowerTriangular (#9779)
- OpenBLAS 64-bit (ILP64) interface is now compiled with a 64_ suffix (#8734) to avoid conflicts with external libraries using a 32-bit BLAS (#4923).
- New vecdot function, analogous to vecnorm, for Euclidean inner products over any iterable container (#11067).
- p = plan_fft(x) and similar functions now return a Base.DFT.Plan object, rather than an anonymous function. Calling it via p(x) is deprecated in favor of p * x or p \ x (for the inverse), and it can also be used with A_mul_B! to employ pre-allocated output arrays (#12087).
- LU{T,Tridiagonal{T}} now supports extraction of L, U, p, and P factors (#12137).
- Allocations in sparse matrix factorizations are now tracked by Julia's garbage collector (#12034).
Strings
- NUL-terminated strings should now be passed to C via the new Cstring type, not Ptr{UInt8} or Ptr{Cchar}, in order to check whether the string is free of NUL characters (which would cause silent truncation in C). The analogous type Cwstring should be used for NUL-terminated wchar_t* strings (#10994).
- graphemes(s) returns an iterator over grapheme substrings of s (#9261).
- Character predicates such as islower(), isspace(), etc. use utf8proc to provide uniform cross-platform behavior and up-to-date, locale-independent support for Unicode standards (#5939).
- reverseind function to convert indices in reversed strings (e.g. from reversed regex searches) to indices in the original string (#9249).
- charwidth(c) and strwidth(s) now return up-to-date cross-platform results (via utf8proc) (#10659): Julia now likes pizza (#3721), but some terminals still don't.
- is_valid_char(c), (now isvalid(Char,c) (#11241)), now correctly handles Unicode "non-characters", which are valid Unicode codepoints (#11171).
- Backreferences in replacement strings in calls to replace with a Regex pattern are now supported (#11849). Use the s string prefix to indicate a replacement string contains a backreference. For example, replace("ab", r"(.)(.)", s"\2\1") yields "ba".
- Capture groups in regular expressions can now be named using PCRE syntax, (?P<group_name>...). Capture group matches can be accessed by name by indexing a Match object with the name of the group (#11566).
- countlines() now counts all lines, not just non-empty (#11947).
Array and AbstractArray improvements
- New multidimensional iterators and index types for efficient iteration over AbstractArrays. Array iteration should generally be written as for i in eachindex(A) ... end rather than for i = 1:length(A) ... end (#8432).
- New implementation of SubArrays with substantial performance and functionality improvements (#8501).
- AbstractArray subtypes only need to implement size and getindex for scalar indices to support indexing; all other indexing behaviors (including logical indexing, ranges of indices, vectors, colons, etc.) are implemented in default fallbacks. Similarly, they only need to implement scalar setindex! to support all forms of indexed assingment (#10525).
- AbstractArrays that do not extend similar now return an Array by default (#10525).
Data structures
- New sortperm! function for pre-allocated index arrays (#8792).
- Switch from O(N) to O(log N) algorithm for dequeue!(pq, key) with PriorityQueue. This provides major speedups for large queues (#8011).
- PriorityQueue now includes the order type among its parameters, PriorityQueue{KeyType,ValueType,OrderType}. An empty queue can be constructed as pq = PriorityQueue(KeyType,ValueType), if you intend to use the default Forward order, or pq = PriorityQueue(KeyType, ValueType, OrderType) otherwise (#8011).
- Efficient mean and median for ranges (#8089).
- deepcopy recurses through immutable types and makes copies of their mutable fields (#8560).
- copy(a::DArray) will now make a copy of a DArray (#9745).
New types
- Enums are now supported through the @enum EnumName EnumValue1 EnumValue2 syntax. Enum member values also support abitrary value assignment by the @enum EnumName EnumValue1=1 EnumValue2=10 EnumValue3=20 syntax (#10168).
- New Dates module for calendar dates and other time-interval calculations (#7654).
- New Nullable type for missing data (#8152).
- A new Val{T} type allows one to dispatch on bits-type values (#9452).
- linspace now returns a LinSpace object which lazily computes linear interpolation of values between the start and stop values. It "lifts" endpoints which are approximately rational in the same manner as the colon operator.
Arithmetic
- convert now checks for overflow when truncating integers or converting between signed and unsigned (#5413).
- Arithmetic is type-preserving for more types; e.g. (x::Int8) + (y::Int8) now yields an Int8 (#3759).
- Reductions (e.g. reduce, sum) widen small types (integers smaller than Int, and Float16).
- Added optional rounding argument to floating-point constructors (#8845).
- Equality (==) and inequality (</<=) comparisons are now correct across all numeric types (#9133, #9198).
- Rational arithmetic throws errors on overflow (#8672).
- Optional log and log1p functions implemented in pure Julia (experimental) (#10008).
- The MathConst type has been renamed Irrational (#11922).
- isapprox now has simpler and more sensible default tolerances (#12393), supports arrays, and has synonyms ≈ (U+2248, LaTeX \approx) and ≉ (U+2249, LaTeX \napprox) for isapprox and !isapprox, respectively (#12472).
Numbers
- primes is now faster and has been extended to generate the primes in a user defined closed interval (#12025).
- The function primesmask which generates a prime sieve for a user defined closed interval is now exported (#12025).
Random numbers
- Streamlined random number generation APIs #8246. The default rand no longer uses global state in the underlying C library, dSFMT, making it closer to being thread-safe (#8399, #8832). All APIs can now take an AbstractRNG argument (#8854, #9065). The seed argument to srand is now optional (#8320, #8854). The APIs accepting a range argument are extended to accept an arbitrary AbstractArray (#9049). Passing a range of BigInt to rand or rand! is now supported (#9122). There are speed improvements across the board (#8808, #8941, #8958, #9083).
- Significantly faster randn (#9126, #9132).
- The randexp and randexp! functions are exported (#9144).
File
- Added function readlink which returns the value of a symbolic link "path" (#10714).
- Added function ismount which checks if a directory is a mount point (#11279).
- The cp function now accepts keyword arguments remove_destination and follow_symlinks (#10888).
- The mv function now accepts keyword argument remove_destination (#11145).
Pipe() creates a bidirectional I/O object that can be passed to spawn or pipeline for redirecting process streams (#12739).
Other improvements
- You can now tab-complete emoji via their short names, using \:name:<tab> (#10709).
- gc_enable subsumes gc_disable, and also returns the previous GC state.
- assert, @assert now throws an AssertionError exception type (#9734).
- @simd now rejects invalid control flow (@goto / break / continue) in the inner loop body at compile time (#8624).
- The machinefile now supports a host count (#7616).
- code_native now outputs branch labels (#8897).
- Added recvfrom to get source address of UDP packets (#9418).
- ClusterManager performance improvements (#9309) and support for changing transports(#9434).
- Added Base.get_process_title / Base.set_process_title (#9957).
- readavailable now returns a byte vector instead of a string.
- New lock and unlock functions, operating on ReentrantLock, to lock a stream during concurrent writes from multiple tasks (#10679).
- code_llvm now outputs stripped IR without debug info or other attached metadata. Use code_llvm_raw for the unstripped output (#10747).
- New withenv(var=>val, ...) do ... end function to temporarily modify environment variables (#10914).
- New function relpath returns a relative filepath to path either from the current directory or from an optional start directory (#10893).
- mktemp and mktempdir now take an optional argument to set which directory the temporary file or directory is created in.
- New garbage collector tracked memory allocator functions: jl_malloc, jl_calloc, jl_realloc, and jl_free with libc API ([#12034]).
- mktempdir and mktemp now have variants that take a function as its first argument for automated clean-up ([#9017]).

Deprecated or removed

several syntax whitespace insensitivities have been deprecated (#11891).

 # function call
 f (x)

 # getindex
 x [17]
 rand(2) [1]

 # function definition
 f (x) = x^2
 function foo (x)
x^2
 end

indexing with Reals that are not subtypes of Integer (Rational, AbstractFloat, etc.) has been deprecated (#10458).
push!(A) has been deprecated, use append! instead of splatting arguments to push! (#10400).
names for composite datatypes has been deprecated and renamed to fieldnames (#10332).
DArray functionality has been removed from Base and is now a standalone package under the JuliaParallel umbrella organization (#10333).
The Graphics module has been removed from Base and is now a standalone package (#10150, #9862).
The Woodbury special matrix type has been removed from LinAlg (#10024).
median and median! no longer accept a checknan keyword argument (#8605).
inf and nan are now deprecated in favor of T(Inf) and T(NaN), respectively (#8776).
oftype(T::Type, x) is deprecated in favor of convert(T,x) (or T(x)).
{...} syntax is deprecated in favor of Any[...] (#8578).
itrunc, ifloor, iceil and iround are deprecated in favour of trunc{T<:Integer}(T,x), floor{T<:Integer}(T,x), etc.. trunc is now always bound-checked;Base.unsafe_trunc provides the old unchecked itrunc behaviour (#9133).
squeeze now requires that passed dimension(s) are an Int or tuple of Ints; calling squeeze with an arbitrary iterator is deprecated (#9271). Additionally, passed dimensions must be unique and correspond to extant dimensions of the input array.
randbool is deprecated. Use rand(Bool) to produce a random boolean value, and bitrand to produce a random BitArray (#9105, #9569).
beginswith is renamed to startswith (#9578).
null is renamed to nullspace (#9714).
The operators |>, .>, >>, and .>> as used for process I/O redirection are replaced with the pipeline function (#5349, #12739).
flipud(A) and fliplr(A) have been deprecated in favor of flipdim(A, 1) and flipdim(A, 2), respectively (#10446).
Numeric conversion functions whose names are lower-case versions of type names have been removed. To convert a scalar, use the type name, e.g. Int32(x). To convert an array to a different element type, use Array{T}(x), map(T,x), or round(T,x). To parse a string as an integer or floating-point number, use parse (#1470, #6211).
Low-level functions from the C library and dynamic linker have been moved to modules Libc and Libdl, respectively (#10328).
The functions parseint, parsefloat, float32_isvalid, float64_isvalid, and the string-argument BigInt and BigFloat have been replaced by parse and tryparse with a type argument. The string macro big"xx" can be used to construct BigInt and BigFloat literals (#3631, #5704, #9487, #10543, #10955).
the --int-literals compiler option is no longer accepted (#9597).
Instead of linrange, use linspace (#9666).
The functions is_valid_char, is_valid_ascii, is_valid_utf8, is_valid_utf16, and is_valid_utf32 have been replaced by generic isvalid methods. The single argument form isvalid(value) can now be used for values of type Char, ASCIIString, UTF8String, UTF16String and UTF32String. The two argument form isvalid(type, value) can be used with the above types, with values of type Vector{UInt8}, Vector{UInt16}, Vector{UInt32}, and Vector{Char} (#11241).
Instead of utf32(64,123,...) use utf32(UInt32[64,123,...]) (#11379).
start_timer and stop_timer are replaced by Timer and close.
The following internal julia C functions have been renamed, in order to prevent potential naming conflicts with C libraries: (#11741)
- gc_wb* -> jl_gc_wb*
- gc_queue_root -> jl_gc_queue_root
- allocobj -> jl_gc_allocobj
- alloc_[0-3]w -> jl_gc_alloc_*w
- diff_gc_total_bytes -> jl_gc_diff_total_bytes
- sync_gc_total_bytes -> jl_gc_sync_total_bytes
require(::AbstractString) and reload (see news about addition of compile).
cartesianmap is deprecated in favor of iterating over a CartesianRange

Julia v0.3.0 Release Notes

New language features

Greatly enhanced performance for passing and returning Tuples (#4042).
Tuples (of Integers, Symbols, or Bools) can now be used as type parameters (#5164).
An additional default "inner" constructor accepting any arguments is now generated. Constructors that look like MyType(a, b) = new(a, b) do not need to be added manually (#4026, #7071).
Expanded array type hierarchy to include an abstract DenseArray for in-memory arrays with standard strided storage (#987, #2345, #6212).
When reloading code, types whose definitions have not changed can be ignored in some cases.
Binary ~ now parses as a vararg macro call to @~. For example x~y~z => @~ x y z (#4882).
Structure fields can now be accessed by index (#4806).
If a module contains a function __init__(), it will be called when the module is first loaded, and on process startup if a pre-compiled version of the module is present (#1268).
Multi-line comments (#69, #6128): #= .... =#
--check-bounds=yes|no compiler option
Unicode identifiers are normalized (NFC) so that different encodings of equivalent strings are treated as the same identifier (#5462).
The set of characters permitted in identifiers has been restricted based on Unicode categories. Generally, punctuation, formatting and control characters, and operator symbols are not allowed in identifiers. Number-like characters cannot begin identifiers (#5936).

Define a limited number of infix Unicode operators (#552, #6582):

Precedence class	Operators (with synonyms, if any)
==	≥ (>=) ≤ (<=) ≡ (===) ≠ (!=) ≢ (!==) .≥ (.>=) .≤ (.<=) .!= (.≠) ∈ (`in`) ∉ (`(x,y)->!in(x, y)`) ∋ (`(x,y)->in(y, x)`) ∌ (`(x,y)->!in(y, x)`) ⊆ (`issubset`) ⊈ (`(x,y)->!issubset(x, y)`) ⊊ (`(x,y)->x⊆y && x!=y`)
+	∪ (`union`)
*	÷ (`div`) ⋅ (`dot`) × (`cross`) ∩ (`intersect`)
unary	√ ∛

In addition to these, many of the Unicode operator symbols are parsed as infix operators and are available for user-defined methods (#6929).

Improved reporting of syntax errors (#6179)
break inside a for loop with multiple ranges now exits the entire loop nest (#5154)
Local goto statements using the @goto and @label macros (#101).

REPL improvements

New native-Julia REPL implementation, eliminating many problems stemming from the old GNU Readline-based REPL (#6270).
Tab-substitution of LaTeX math symbols (e.g. \alpha by α) (#6911). This also works in IJulia and in Emacs (#6920).
workspace() function for obtaining a fresh workspace (#1195).

Library improvements

isequal now compares all numbers by value, ignoring type (#6624).
Implement limited shared-memory parallelism with SharedArrays (#5380).
Well-behaved floating-point ranges (#2333, #5636). Introduced the FloatRange type for floating-point ranges with a step, which will give intuitive/correct results for classically problematic ranges like 0.1:0.1:0.3, 0.0:0.7:2.1 or 1.0:1/49:27.0.
mod2pi function (#4799, #4862).
New functions minmax and extrema (#5275).
New macros @edit, @less, @code_typed, @code_lowered, @code_llvm and @code_native that all function like @which (#5832).
consume(p) extended to consume(p, args...), allowing it to optionally pass args... back to the producer (#4775).
.juliarc.jl is now loaded for both script and REPL execution (#5076).
The Sys module now includes convenient functions for working with dynamic library handles; Sys.dllist will list out all paths currently loaded via dlopen, and Sys.dlpath will lookup a path from a handle
readdlm treats multiple whitespace characters as a single delimiter by default (when no delimiter is specified). This is useful for reading fixed-width or messy whitespace-delimited data (#5403).
The Airy, Bessel, Hankel, and related functions (airy*, bessel*, hankel*) now detect errors returned by the underlying AMOS library, throwing an AmosException in that case (#4967).
methodswith now returns an array of Methods (#5464) rather than just printing its results.
errno([code]) function to get or set the C library's errno.
GitHub module for interacting with the GitHub API.
Package improvements
- Packages are now installed into .julia/v0.3 by default (or whatever the current Julia version is), so that different versions of Julia can co-exist with incompatible packages. Existing .julia installations are unaffected unless Pkg.init() is run to re-create the package directories (#3344, #5737).
- Pkg.submit(pkg[,commit]) function to automatically submit a GitHub pull request to the package author.
Collections improvements
- Array assignment (e.g. x[:] = y) ignores singleton dimensions and allows the last dimension of one side to match all trailing dimensions of the other (#4048, #4383).
- Dict(kv) constructor for any iterator on (key,value) pairs.
- Multi-key Dicts: D[x,y...] is now a synonym for D[(x,y...)] for associations D (#4870).
- push! and unshift! can push multiple arguments (#4782).
- writedlm and writecsv now accept any iterable collection of iterable rows, in addition to AbstractArray arguments, and the writedlm delimiter can be any printable object (e.g. a String) instead of just a Char.
- isempty now works for any iterable collection (#5827).
- unique now accepts an optional dim argument for finding unique rows or columns of a matrix or regions of a multidimensional array (#5811).
Number improvements
- The ImaginaryUnit type no longer exists. Instead, im is of type Complex{Bool}. Making this work required changing the semantics of boolean multiplication to approximately, true * x = x and false * x = zero(x), which can itself be considered useful (#5468).
- big is now vectorized (#4766)
- nextpow and prevpow now return the a^n values instead of the exponent n (#4819)
- Overflow detection in parseint (#4874).
- rand now supports arbitrary Ranges arguments (#5059).
- expm1 and log1p now support complex arguments (#3141).
- Broadcasting .// is now included (#7094).
- prevfloat and nextfloat now saturate at -Inf and Inf, respectively, and have otherwise been fixed to follow the IEEE-754 standard functions nextDown and nextUp (#5025).
- New function widen for widening numeric types and values, and widemul for multiplying to a larger type (#6169).
- polygamma, digamma, and trigamma now accept complex arguments, and zeta(s, z) now provides the Hurwitz zeta (#7125).
- Narrow integer types (< 32 bits) are promoted to Float64 rather than to Float32 by float(x) (#7390).
String improvements
- Triple-quoted regex strings, r"""...""" (#4934).
- New string type, UTF16String (#4930), constructed by utf16(s) from another string, a Uint16 array or pointer, or a byte array (possibly prefixed by a byte-order marker to indicate endian-ness). Its data is internally NULL-terminated for passing to C (#7016).
- CharString is renamed to UTF32String (#4943), and its data is now internally NULL-terminated for passing to C (#7016). CharString(c::Char...) is deprecated in favor of utf32(c...), and utf32(s) otherwise has functionality similar to utf16(s).
- New WString and wstring synonyms for either UTF16String and utf16 or UTF32String and utf32, respectively, depending on the width of Cwchar_t (#7016).
- normalize_string function to perform Unicode normalization, case-folding, and other transformations (#5576).
- pointer(s, i=1) for ByteString, UTF16String, UTF32String, and SubStrings thereof (#5703).
- bytestring is automatically called on String arguments for conversion to Ptr{Uint8} in ccall (#5677).
Linear algebra improvements
- Balancing options for eigenvector calculations for general matrices (#5428).
- Mutating linear algebra functions no longer promote (#5526).
- condskeel for Skeel condition numbers (#5726).
- norm(::Matrix) no longer calculates a vector norm when the first dimension is one (#5545); it always uses the operator (induced) matrix norm.
- New vecnorm(itr, p=2) function that computes the norm of any iterable collection of numbers as if it were a vector of the same length. This generalizes and replaces normfro (#6057), and norm is now type-stable (#6056).
- New UniformScaling matrix type and identity I constant (#5810).
- None of the concrete matrix factorization types are exported from Base by default anymore.
- Sparse linear algebra
  - 1-d sparse getindex has been implemented (#7047)
  - Faster sparse getindex (#7131).
  - Faster sparse kron (#4958).
  - sparse(A) \ B now supports a matrix B of right-hand sides (#5196).
  - eigs(A, sigma) now uses shift-and-invert for nonzero shifts sigma and inverse iteration for which="SM". If sigma==nothing (the new default), computes ordinary (forward) iterations (#5776).
  - sprand is faster, and whether any entry is nonzero is now determined independently with the specified probability (#6726).
- Dense linear algebra for special matrix types
  - Interconversions between the special matrix types Diagonal, Bidiagonal, SymTridiagonal, Triangular, and Triangular, and Matrix are now allowed for matrices which are representable in both source and destination types (5e3f074b).
  - Allow for addition and subtraction over mixed matrix types, automatically promoting the result to the denser matrix type (a448e080, #5927)
  - new algorithms for linear solvers and eigensystems of Bidiagonal matrices of generic element types (#5277)
  - new algorithms for linear solvers, eigensystems and singular systems of Diagonal matrices of generic element types (#5263)
  - new algorithms for linear solvers and eigensystems of Triangular matrices of generic element types (#5255)
  - specialized inv and det methods for Tridiagonal and SymTridiagonal based on recurrence relations between principal minors (#5358)
  - specialized transpose, ctranspose, istril, istriu methods for Triangular (#5255) and Bidiagonal (#5277)
  - new LAPACK wrappers
    - condition number estimate cond(A::Triangular) (#5255)
  - parametrize Triangular on matrix type (#7064)
  - Lyapunov / Sylvester solver (#7435)
  - eigvals for Symmetric, Tridiagonal and Hermitian matrices now support additional method signatures: (#3688, #6652, #6678, #7647)
    - eigvals(M, el, eu) finds all eigenvalues in the interval (el, eu]
    - eigvals(M, il:iu) finds the ilth through the iuth eigenvalues (in ascending order)
- Dense linear algebra for generic matrix element types
  - LU factorization (#5381 and #5430)
  - QR factorization (#5526)
New function deleteat! deletes a specified index or indices and returns the updated collection
The setenv function for external processes now accepts a dir keyword argument for specifying the directory to start the child process in (#4888).
Constructors for collections (Set, Dict, etc.) now generally accept a single iterable argument giving the elements of the collection (#4996, #4871)
Ranges and arrays with the same elements are now unequal. This allows hashing and comparing ranges to be faster (#5778).
Broadcasting now works on arbitrary AbstractArrays (#5387)
Reduction functions that accept a pre-allocated output array, including sum!, prod!, maximum!, minimum!, all!, any! (#6197, #5387)
Faster performance on fill! and copy! for array types not supporting efficient linear indexing (#5671, #5387)
Changes to range types (#5585)
- Range is now the abstract range type, instead of Ranges
- New function range for constructing ranges by length
- Range is now StepRange, and Range1 is now UnitRange. Their constructors accept end points instead of lengths. Both are subtypes of a new abstract type OrdinalRange.
- Ranges now support BigInt and general ordinal types.
- Very large ranges (e.g. 0:typemax(Int)) can now be constructed, but some operations (e.g. length) will raise an OverflowError.
Extended API for cov and cor, which accept keyword arguments vardim, corrected, and mean (#6273)
New functions randsubseq and randsubseq! to create a random subsequence of an array (#6726)
New macro @evalpoly for efficient inline evaluation of polynomials (#7146).
The signal filtering function filt now accepts an optional initial filter state vector. A new in-place function filt! is also exported (#7513).
Significantly faster cumsum and cumprod (#7359).
Implement findmin and findmax over specified array dimensions (#6716).
Support memory-mapping of files with offsets on Windows (#7242).
Catch writes to protect memory, such as when trying to modify a mmapped file opened in read-only mode (#3434).

Environment improvements

New --code-coverage and --track-allocation startup features allow one to measure the number of executions or the amount of memory allocated, respectively, at each line of code (#5423,#7464).
Profile.init now accepts keyword arguments, and returns the current settings when no arguments are supplied (#7365).

Build improvements

Dependencies are now verified against stored MD5/SHA512 hashes, to ensure that the correct file has been downloaded and was not modified (#6773).

Deprecated or removed

convert(Ptr{T1}, x::Array{T2}) is now deprecated unless T1 == T2 or T1 == Void (#6073). (You can still explicitly convert one pointer type into another if needed.)
Sys.shlib_ext has been renamed to Sys.dlext
dense is deprecated in favor of full (#4759).
The Stat type is renamed StatStruct (#4670).
setrounding, rounding and setrounding now take an additional argument specifying the floating point type to which they apply. The old behaviour and [get/set/with]_bigfloat_rounding functions are deprecated (#5007).
cholpfact and qrpfact are deprecated in favor of keyword arguments in cholfact(..., pivot=true) and qrfact(..., pivot=true) (#5330).
symmetrize! is deprecated in favor of Base.LinAlg.copytri! (#5427).
myindexes has been renamed to localindexes (#5475).
factorize! is deprecated in favor of factorize (#5526).
nnz counts the number of structural nonzeros in a sparse matrix. Use countnz for the actual number of nonzeros (#6769).
setfield is renamed setfield! (#5748).
put and take are renamed put! and take! (#5511).
put! now returns its first argument, the remote reference (#5819).
read methods that modify a passed array are now called read! (#5970)
infs and nans are deprecated in favor of the more general fill.
* and div are no longer supported for Char.
Range is renamed StepRange and Range1 is renamed UnitRange. Ranges is renamed Range.
bitmix is replaced by a 2-argument form of hash.
readsfrom and writesto are replaced by open (#6948).
insert! now throws a BoundsError if index > length(collection)+1 (#7373).
No longer exported from Base:
- start_reading, stop_reading, start_watching (#10885).

Julia v0.2.0 Release Notes

The 0.2 release brings improvements to many areas of Julia. Among the most visible changes are support for 64-bit Windows, keyword arguments to functions, immutable types, a redesigned and polished package manager, a multimedia interface supporting usage of Julia in IPython, a built-in profiler, and major improvements to Julia's linear algebra, I/O, and parallel capabilities. These are accompanied by many other changes adding new features, enhancing the library's consistency, improving performance, increasing test coverage, easing installation, and expanding the documentation. While not part of Julia proper, the package ecosystem has also grown and matured considerably since the 0.1 release. See below for more information about the long list of changes that improve Julia's usability and performance.

New language features

Keyword & optional function arguments (#485, #1817).
Immutable types (#13).
Triple-quoted string literals (#70).
New infix operator in (e.g. x in S), and corresponding function in(x,S), replacing contains(S,x) function (#2703).

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).
Methods can be added to functions in other modules using dot syntax, as in Foo.bar(x) = 0.
import module: name1, name2, ... (#5214).
A semicolon is now allowed after an import or using statement (#4130).

In an interactive session (REPL), you can use ;cmd to run cmd via an interactive shell. For example:

julia> ;ls
CONTRIBUTING.md  Makefile           VERSION      deps/      julia@  ui/
DISTRIBUTING.md  NEWS.md            Windows.inc  doc/       src/    usr/
LICENSE.md       README.md          base/        etc/       test/
Make.inc         README.windows.md  contrib/     examples/  tmp/

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).
Support for setting floating-point rounding modes (#3149).
methodswith shows all methods with an argument of specific type.
mapslices provides a general way to perform operations on slices of arrays (#2204).
repeat function for constructing Arrays with repeated elements (#3605).
Collections.PriorityQueue type and Collections.heap functions (#2920).
quadgk 1d-integration routine (#3140).
erfinv and erfcinv functions (#2987).
varm, stdm (#2265).
digamma, invdigamma, trigamma and polygamma for calculating derivatives of gamma function (#3233).
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 Task synchronization.
versioninfo provides detailed version information, especially useful when reporting and diagnosing bugs.
detach for running child processes in a separate process group.
setenv for passing environment variables to child processes.
ifelse eagerly-evaluated conditional function, especially useful for vectorized conditionals.

Library improvements

isequal now returns false for numbers of different types. This makes it much easier to define hashing for new numeric types. Uses of Dict with numeric keys might need to change to account for this increased strictness.
A redesigned and rewritten Pkg system is much more robust in case of problems. The basic interface to adding and removing package requirements remains the same, but great deal of additional functionality for developing packages in-place was added. See the new packages chapter in the manual for further details.
Sorting API updates (#3665) – see sorting functions.
The delete!(d::Dict, key) function has been split into separate pop! and delete! functions (#3439). pop!(d,key) removes key from d and returns the value that was associated with it; it throws an exception if d does not contain key. delete!(d,key) removes key from d and succeeds regardless of whether d contained key or not, returning d itself in either case.
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 a general iseltype function.
Transitive comparison of floats with rationals (#3102).
Fast prime generation with primes and fast primality testing with isprime.
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, #4055).
isreadable/iswritable methods added for more IO types (#3872).
Much faster and improved readdlm and writedlm (#3350, #3468, #3483).
Faster matchall (#3719), and various string and regex improvements.
Documentation of advanced linear algebra features (#2807).
Support optional RTLD flags in dlopen (#2380).
pmap now works with any iterable collection.
Options in pmap for retrying or ignoring failed tasks.
New sinpi(x) and cospi(x) functions to compute sine and cosine of pi*x more accurately (#4112).
New implementations of elementary complex functions sqrt, log, asin, acos, atan, tanh, asinh, acosh, atanh with correct branch cuts (#2891).
Improved behavior of SubArray (#4412, #4284, #4044, #3697, #3790, #3148, #2844, #2644 and various other fixes).
New convenience functions in graphics API.
Improved backtraces on Windows and OS X.
Implementation of reduction functions (including reduce, mapreduce, sum, prod, maximum, minimum, all, and any) are refactored, with improved type stability, efficiency, and consistency (#6116, #7035, #7061, #7106).

Deprecated or removed

Methods of min and max that do reductions were renamed to minimum and maximum. min(x) is now minimum(x), and min(x,(),dim) is now minimum(x,dim) (#4235).
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 became a method of 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_end replaced 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 in 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!.
ls function deprecated in favor of readdir or ;ls in the REPL.
start_timer now expects arguments in units of seconds, not milliseconds.
Shell redirection operators |, >, and < eliminated in favor of a new operator |> (#3523).
amap is deprecated in favor of new mapslices functionality.
The Reverse iterator was removed since it did not work in many cases.
The gcd function now returns a non-negative value regardless of the argument signs, and various other sign problems with invmod, lcm, gcdx, and powermod were fixed (#4811).

Miscellaneous changes

julia-release-* executables renamed to julia-*, and libjulia-release renamed to libjulia (#4177).
Packages will now be installed in .julia/vX.Y, where X.Y is the current Julia version.

Bugfixes and performance updates

Too numerous to mention.

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