Announcing Julia 0.3.0 final

[Elliot Saba]

We are pleased to announce the immediate release of Julia 0.3.0.  This release contains numerous improvements across the board from standard library changes to pure performance enhancements as well as an expanded ecosystem of packages as compared to the 0.2 releases. A summary of changes is available in NEWS.md in our main repository, and binaries are now available on our main download page.

We are now transitioning into the 0.4 development cycle, and encourage users to use the 0.3.X line if they need a stable julia environment.  Many breaking changes will be entering the environment over the course of the next few months, and to denote this builds will have use the versioning scheme 0.4.0-dev.  Once the major breaking changes have been merged and the development cycle progresses towards a stable release, the version will shift to 0.4.0-pre, at which point package authors and users should start to think about transitioning the codebases over to the 0.4.X line.

The release-0.3 branch of the codebase will remain open for bugfixes during this time, and we encourage users facing problems to open issues on our GitHub tracker, or email the julia-users mailing list.

Happy coding.

[K Leo]

It is great now that we have 0.3 released. Thank you all very much!

A question on future updates.

In the past months, I have been using julia nightlies PPA to get the
most updated builds. Generally, it has been working well for me. The
nightlies have not caused big problems for my applications.

Now the nightlies will be the early builds of 0.4. Is that reasonable
to assume these early builds will be less reliable and so I should
better stay with 0.3 for some time?

On 2014年08月21日 07:45, Elliot Saba wrote:
> We are pleased to announce the immediate release of Julia 0.3.0. This
> release contains numerous improvements across the board from standard
> library changes to pure performance enhancements as well as an
> expanded ecosystem of packages as compared to the 0.2 releases. A
> summary of changes is available in NEWS.md

> <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/021d87dc7290ef2804a01660c561c8a6ce522d02/NEWS.md> in

> our main repository, and binaries are now available on our main

> download page <http://julialang.org/downloads/>.

>
> We are now transitioning into the 0.4 development cycle, and encourage
> users to use the 0.3.X line if they need a stable julia environment.
> Many breaking changes will be entering the environment over the
> course of the next few months, and to denote this builds will have use
> the versioning scheme 0.4.0-dev. Once the major breaking changes have
> been merged and the development cycle progresses towards a stable
> release, the version will shift to 0.4.0-pre, at which point package
> authors and users should start to think about transitioning the
> codebases over to the 0.4.X line.
>
> The release-0.3 branch of the codebase will remain open for bugfixes
> during this time, and we encourage users facing problems to open
> issues on our GitHub tracker

> <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues>, or email the julia-users
> mailing list <https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/julia-users>.
>
> Happy coding.

[Kevin Squire]

On Wednesday, August 20, 2014, K Leo <cnbi...@gmail.com> wrote: 

Now the nightlies will be the early builds of 0.4.  Is that reasonable to assume these early builds will be less reliable and so I should better stay with 0.3 for some time?

They probably won't get toooo broken, but there are a lot of potentially breaking changes planned, so quite likely less reliable than what you've been seeing.  

It's more likely that many packages will stop working well (or at all) with v0.4 as changes are incorporated. 

Cheers,

   Kevin. 

[Jeff Bezanson]

If you need code to keep working without hassle, definitely stick with
the 0.3 series.

Nightly builds for bleeding-edge tinkering only.

[Ross Boylan]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 11:27:11PM -0700, Kevin Squire wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 20, 2014, K Leo <cnbi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Now the nightlies will be the early builds of 0.4. Is that reasonable to
> > assume these early builds will be less reliable and so I should better stay
> > with 0.3 for some time?
> >
>
> They probably won't get toooo broken, but there are a lot of potentially
> breaking changes planned, so quite likely less reliable than what you've
> been seeing.

Is there a way to get a sense of what those are, esp. stuff we might
want to keep in mind as we write code for 0.3? Is there some place to
go for a roadmap?

I tried https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/milestones/0.4-projects,
and paying special attention to the "breaking" tag, but I'm not sure
if that's the way to go.

Finally, is there a way to find what the tags mean beyond guessing
from the tag? For example, what exactly is broken by something tagged
"breaking"? I don't mean what the specific changes are for a
particular issue, but what are the situations in which it applies?

Another example is the "decision" tag. Does that mean a decision has
been made? Or that it needs to be made?

Thanks.

Ross Boylan

[Elliot Saba]

Tags are generally used when something hasn't been resolved yet.  E.g. the `decision` tag means a nontrivial decision needs to be made.

the `0.4` and `0.4-projects` tags are the best way to get a feel for what is on the agenda for 0.4.  There may be more big projects, or less, it's impossible to say right now, but there are already some big things lined up.  To get a feel for the most interesting changes, I'd suggest sorting by number of comments.  This isn't a perfect measure, but it does bring some interesting things to the top;

Array Views, libgit2 integration, overloading of field access (e.g. `a.b`), associating data with functions, modules, etc... (that's a fancy way of saying better documentation), Incremental GC upgrade, C-struct compatibility.... and those are just the largest, most interesting ones I can see for now.

Of course, there may be even more groundshaking and interesting things to come out, I know some work has been done regarding multithreading, static compilation, etc... but I cannot hazard a guess as to when we might see such things appear in actual builds.

-E

[Job van der Zwan]

Congratulations everyone!

On Thursday, 21 August 2014 08:36:32 UTC+2, Jeff Bezanson wrote:

If you need code to keep working without hassle, definitely stick with
the 0.3 series.

Nightly builds for bleeding-edge tinkering only.

I got the impression some packages tend to break if they update and you weren't up to date with the latest nightly? Was that an exceptional situation as we converged to 0.3?

[Jeff Bezanson]

That tends to be the case for the newest version or master branch of
packages. But if you use v0.3 the package manager should take care of
only using more stable package versions compatible with it.

[Elliot Saba]

Ideally this should not happen, however due to the large amount of functionality offered in Julia 0.3 as compared to 0.2, many packages became 0.3-compatible only.  In that case, of course, you have no choice but to use 0.3 nightlies in order to use those packages.

In the 0.4 development cycle, we're trying to break things down into slightly more granular chunks: We're officially designating these first few crazy months as the 0.4.0-dev period, (reflected in the version numbers of nightlies) wherein everything is fair game for breakage, and some packages will likely break.

Once most big changes have had a chance to settle and we start thinking about releasing 0.4.0, we will transition to the 0.4.0-pre phase.  This is where a much larger percentage of the userbase can think about starting to use nightly builds, similar to a beta.  After that of course, we enter the familiar release candidate phase, followed by a final release.

We don't suggest that people who want to use a stable environment use the 0.4.0-dev builds, as I can almost guarantee you a lot of packages will break as soon as we merge a few of the upcoming big changes.  It's possible there will be packages that will require 0.4.0-dev features, but most packages that work now should still be compatible with 0.3.0 in the future.  That is, after all, what our package manager is meant to do.

-E

[Ivo Balbaert]

Again a giant step forward for a great language!

Op donderdag 21 augustus 2014 01:46:21 UTC+2 schreef Elliot Saba:

[Job van der Zwan]

Thanks for the explanations!

If I switch the Ubuntu PPA to stable builds, is it advisable that I do a clean installation of all packages too? Or does the Julia package manager also automatically fix that?

[Elliot Saba]

The Julia package manager will take care of those kinds of problems. If you were on 0.3.0-prerelease builds before, and you're switching to 0.3.0 final, you shouldn't have problems anyway.

-E

[M Long]

I am quite curious on opinions when Julia Studio may have 0.30 cooked in? 

I know this is not the Studio news group, but I am curious on opinions on when that may happen, as I am new and don't have a good feeling for the history of when these things happen.

Thanks!

[Westley Hennigh]

Hey M Long,

I'm speaking for myself here, and it's entirely possible there are things I don't know, but it's really unlikely Julia Studio will receive any real support. There were two of us at Forio working on the project, but neither of us is there now and they've marked it as extremely low priority. I think it's possible they may release a bundle that comes with Julia 0.3, but it probably won't integrate any of the cool new REPL features or anything like that.

The project is open source, and I believe that if you build from master and download Julia 0.3 independently it will work, but I would really suggest just going with something like Sublime Text and using the built-in Julia REPL.

At some I think it would be awesome to use the QtCreator (which Julia Studio is based on) GDB interface with whatever comes out of the Julia debugger work that's happening - and at that point it might be worth investing the time into integrating the Julia REPL into Julia Studio as well... but none of that is in the cards right now, we'll have to see what happens.

[gentlebeldin]

I've installed Julia via Ubuntu Software-Center, so it installed v0.2.1, months ago. To switch to v0.3, do I have to remove that installation and install the new version with the (Linux) package manager, or is there a gentler way? Probably, there isn't, and what will happen to IJulia etc.? I guess I'll have to re-install that, too, with the Julia package manager, is that correct?

[Elliot Saba]

If you add the official Ubuntu releases PPA, it will automatically pick up Julia 0.3 as a normal software update.  Your packages will likely need to be reinstalled since major versions of julia separate their packages from one another.

-E

[gentlebeldin]

Works like a charm, thanks!