Julia 0.7 has been released – it’s time to prepare for Julia 1.0

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Julia 0.7 announced by the Julia developer team was speculated for a long time after v0.6 was released last year. This sets the gate open for Julia v1.0 since we had seen discussions and forecast about the v1.0 after v0.6 was out.

Most features included in Julia v0.7 are the feature set for Julia v1.0 with few improvements and bug-fixes. Nothing is confirmed by the Julia team yet but the community is predicting Julia v1.0 to be next after Julia 0.7.

Important features in Julia 0.7 are as follows:

New macros defined for testing the local variable.
Destructuring in function arguments so that the variable in a function expression gets unpacked into the local variable.
Keyword argument containers will be named tuples.
Keyword arguments will be required in the declaration to avoid the exceptions.

To know the whole list of specifications, check out the release notes page here at Julia’s GitHub repository.

Julia 0.7 will be released with exceptions in compatibility for functionalities of Julia 0.6. These exceptions will, however, discontinue in Julia 1.0. Apart from this, Julia 1.0 will add some functionality that will be prevented in Julia v0.7. It seems to be a bit complicated compatibility planning by Julia community, which is expected to get sorted with Julia 1.0.

The community hinted Julia 0.7 and 1.0 to be identical. This means programs that are running on Julia 0.7, will work exactly the same on 1.0 without any warnings. The release time for Julia 1.0 is expected to be short after Julia 0.7.

Julia 0.7 is said to be stable and production ready, but the community advised to keep the deprecations of features in mind. Additionally, when developers upgrade to Julia 1.0, they will have to run the tests and use cases all over again.