I have a colleague that asked me help to install Julia, and I wanted to know when Julia 1.6 is likely to be released (I am afraid he get scared with the infamous time-to-first-plot issue).
I understand that the correct answer is “when it is ready” or “when the blocking issues count goes to zero”, but as an educated guess, is it likely to be in the next few weeks or is it rather a matter of several months ?
Cheers !
I wanted to know when Julia 1.6 is likely to be released
1.6-Beta - is Work in progress
And
https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1336749476967493634
There have been 3 months between branching of v1.5 out of master and the release of v1.5.0. You should expect something of this order of magnitude
Am I right that there are no julia 1.6 binaries available now? Before branching the “nightly” downloads were 1.6, but currently they are of 1.7 version.
This seems a bit strange, to have 1.5 and 1.7 binaries, but not 1.6…
You’re right, but note there isn’t a huge difference at the moment between the master branch and the release-1.6 branch.
Binaries from the release branches aren’t published on a regular basis, but I think that when there will be an “alpha” or “beta” release there will be a new official binary to play with. It has been always this way, at least as far as I could remember.
Thanks, I just don’t think I ever used nightlies before 1.6.
I understand that currently there is basically no difference between 1.6 and 1.7, but it will accumulate over time. And 1.6 is likely to be more “stable” in this case, right?
More or less, yes. Broadly speaking, the development continues as follows:
master is now the basis for the development of Julia v1.7release-1.6 branchmaster branch. They will include both bug fixes and new features. Bug fixes necessary for v1.6 will be backported in the release-1.6 branch. At this point no new feature can be added to v1.6, so changes which introduce new features will only stay in masterA bit, but in practice that should not matter before the release. See “Risk Tolerance Personas” in
If you are using master or release-X.Y around alpha/beta, you are “high risk tolerance” for practical purposes.
Are there any info about the release of 1.6? 
You could monitor the 1.6 blockers milestone.
While the immediate next step is a 1.6-beta soon, I should point out that that 1.5 solves the time to first plot greatly. It will be slightly better in 1.6, but the big improvements in producing a plot in a new Julia session went into 1.5.
What 1.6 does is that it precompiles packages on download rather than on first use, that greatly improves the perception - and it also parallelizes the precompilation.
-viral
It depends on the time , I guess. Current 1.7 is slightly faster than last 1.6 to precompile my package but it makes VSC language server crash and broke Revise.
Yes, that’s the meaning of “at the moment”
Yes, except that “at the moment”, there is a significant difference
I read there a new ClearStacktrace.jl like improvement on the stacktrace. That would be great to see too! 
In Julia blockers, number of items (open issues) sometimes drops to 2, rises suddenly, and drop again. I even saw it was zero. What is the stop criterion? Is there a predefined future or todo list besides the blocker issues?
The number of blockers rizes when me issues are found that prevent release. We’ll release a rc1 once we have a short period of 0 blockers. 1.6 final gets released when we have a week with no issues that block us from releasing the most recent rc.
very satisfied. thank you for the answer!
Perhaps this blog post is useful to point people to: Julia’s Release Process