Julia 1.5 has been released

[Posted August 3, 2020 by jake]

Version 1.5 of the Julia programming language has been released. On the Julia blog, Jeff Bezanson and Stefan Karpinski describe the highlights of the release, which includes struct layout improvements for decreasing heap allocations, stabilization of the multithreading API, faster random numbers, changes to the scoping rules in the read-eval-print loop (REPL), and more. "Julia excels at simulations, so random numbers are important to a lot of users of the language. For this release Rafael Fourquet, one of the primary architects of the Random standard library and a prolific contributor in general, implemented some impressive algorithmic improvements for some popular cases. The first is a major improvement when generating normally-distributed double-precision floats. Calling randn(1000) is nearly twice as fast in Julia 1.5 compared with Julia 1.4. Generating random booleans also got much faster: rand(Bool, 1000) is nearly 6x faster. Finally, sampling from discrete collections has also gotten faster: rand(1:100, 1000) got 25% faster." LWN looked at Julia (part 1, part 2) back in 2018, shortly after the release of Julia 1.0.

Julia 1.5 has been released

Posted Aug 5, 2020 5:50 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I've been using Julia for 4 years now (my other main language these days is Python; I have used C, Ocaml etc in the past). For scientific programming Julia is really a fantastic language. As easy as python to program in, as fast as C, works perfectly in Jupyter.

For general purpose programming I guess one drawback is that you can't generate an executable: the end user needs to install the Julia system, and manually install any required packages, to run a third party program.