Julia v1.2 releases with support for argument splatting, Unicode 12, new star unary operator, and more

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Yesterday, the team behind Julia announced the release of Julia v1.2. It is the second minor release in the 1.x series and has new features such as argument splatting, support for Unicode 12 and a new ⋆ (star) unary operator. Julia v1.2 also has many performance improvements with marginal and undisruptive changes.

The post states that Julia v1.2 will not have a long term support and “As of this release, 1.1 has been effectively superseded by 1.2, which means there will not likely be any further 1.1.x releases. Our good friend 1.0 is still currently the only long-term support version.”

What’s new in Julia v1.2

This version supports Argument splatting (x…). It can be used in calls to the new pseudo-function in constructors.
Support for Unicode 12 has been added.
A new unary operator ⋆ (star) has been added.

New library functions

A new argument !=(x), >(x), >=(x), <(x), <=(x) has been added to assist in returning the partially-applied versions of the functions
A new getipaddrs() function is added to return all the IP addresses of the local machine with the IPv4 addresses
New library function Base.hasproperty and Base.hasfield

Other improvements in Julia v1.2

Multi-threading changes

It will now be possible to schedule and switch tasks during @threads loops, and perform limited I/O.
A new thread-safe replacement has been added to the Condition type. It can now be accessed as Threads.Condition.

Standard library changes

The extrema function now accepts a function argument in the same way like minimum and maximum.
The hasmethod method can now check for matching keyword argument names.
The mapreduce function will accept multiple iterators.
Functions that invoke commands like run(::Cmd), will get a ProcessFailedException rather than an ErrorException.
A new no-argument constructor for Ptr{T} has been added to construct a null pointer.

Jeff Bezanson, Julia co-creator says, “If you maintain any packages, this is a good time to add CI for 1.2, check compatibility, and tag new versions as needed.”

Users are happy with the Julia v1.2 release and are all praises for the Julia language.

A user on Hacker News comments, “Julia has very well thought syntax and runtime

I hope to see it succeed in the server-side web development area.”

Another user says, “I’ve recently switched to Julia for all my side projects and I’m loving it so far! For me the killer feature is the seamless GPUs integration.”

For more information on Julia v1.2, head over to its release notes.