At the current rate of switching important packages to support v0.6, when is it expected that v0.5 will no longer be “needed”? I am asking this because I am planning the launch of some modules soon and I wonder if I can safely turn my back on v0.5 for good without regretting it a few months later. I would appreciate your advice, thanks.
Based on past experience, I’m guessing that almost no open-source Julia developers will be using 0.5 much by 3 months after release, i.e. by the end of summer. Corporate users might take longer to switch over. Academic installations often don’t switch in the middle of an academic term, but since it is summer I expect that most Julia-based courses will be using 0.6 by the fall term.
Major packages will probably try to preserve 0.5 support for as long as possible, but the deprecation warnings for struct/type in 0.7 (which can’t be eliminated without dropping 0.5 support) will probably push many developers (who often use bleeding-edge Julia versions) to drop 0.5 support as soon as they can get away with it.
If you are starting a new package, you should probably just target 0.6+ in my opinion.
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I see, v0.6 it is then. 3 months doesn’t sound awfully long. Thanks.