Very happy with 0.6-rc1

Internals & Design
1

Sorry for the spam, but I just wanted to give a thank you to the Julia development team: so far, 0.6-rc1 has been great! This is likely the first 0.*-rc1 that I haven’t managed to crash (even having started a major rewrite of ApproxFun for 0.6), and the new where syntax with triangular dispatch has greatly simplified the code. It is also a lot easier to read:

foo(x::Number) = ...
foo(x::Vector{T}) where {T} = ...

than the previous syntax.

And the biggest improvement: ^C works in Juno on Mac again :wink: More seriously: the fact that functions recompile when you re-define a function (without having to restart Julia and recompile everything) has increased productively by a huge amount.

2

I don’t think anyone would consider this kind of positive feedback to be spam :blush:. It’s nice to hear positive feedback since usually happy = silent so all the noise tends to be about things that are less than ideal.

3

Actually I have found that 0.6 broke a lot more stuff than 0.5, a lot of this has to do with broadcasting. This is certainly not because there is anything wrong with 0.6, however, as far as I have found after about a month of using it. The new broadcasting features are great, and I particularly love having the ability to do e.g. Vector{<:Real}. Maybe it’s my imagination but compile time also seems to have improved somewhat in some cases. Great work as always!

4

Yes, thanks for the amazing work on this release. You’re right, this does not get said enough :sunny: