
Julia v0.5.0 Released - dlss
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-0.5/NEWS.md
======
sundarurfriend
Quite a milestone for Julia, and an important step forward towards stability
as well: I believe a core Julia team member (Viral Shah IIRC) said that there
would be only one or two major releases between 0.5 and 1.0.

One thing I like about Julia development is how receptive they are to
community ideas, while also making sure the suggestions fit into the larger
pattern and rejecting those that don't. (The "Support for arrays with indexing
starting at values different from 1" thing does worry me, since it has the
potential to screw things up gloriously, but it seems[1] they predicted HN
will gnaw at this one. :) And I'm yet to read the whole of that issue, maybe
it'll end up convincing me it's a good idea.)

[1]
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16260](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/16260)

~~~
mvardin
Given the long list of "breaking changes" and "Deprecated or removed" I think
it is premature to suggest that they are moving towards stability.

~~~
cschmidt
I think the idea is that they're trying to make the breaking changes sooner
rather than later. It should settle down after this release.

------
yla92
Prior discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535072)

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tempodox
I take it, there is still no support for the production of stand-alone binary
executables?

Rumours persist that this feature is planned. Or are they just plain wrong?

~~~
ihnorton
There has been ongoing work toward supporting this feature. See:

[http://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/03/10/j2c-announcement.h...](http://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/03/10/j2c-announcement.html)

[http://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/02/09/static-
julia.html](http://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/02/09/static-julia.html)

~~~
whyrt12
How close are we to web assembly compilation?

~~~
ihnorton
I'm not aware of anyone working on it. There were some attempts with
Emscripten which ran in to unsupported instructions; some of those may be
supported by newer versions of Emscripten, but I haven't heard of any attempts
to get this going recently.

~~~
whyrt12
Gotcha. Is it definitely technically feasible, or is that still unknown?

~~~
ihnorton
For Julia core it should be feasible, but possibly requiring patches to
Emscripten, so the level of effort is still unknown. The other issue is the C
and Fortran numerical libraries -- some of which use inline-assembly, others
(Fortran) don't have a working LLVM frontend as far as I know.

~~~
Jcol1
Got it

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qd6pwu4
Last time I used julia was in Juno, the loading of package was really slow, is
this problem solved now? It once gave me a lot of hope...but the result was a
little bit disappointing given that it claims so much. It has macro, if only
it has lisp syntax...

~~~
sundarurfriend
> the loading of package was really slow

Was this on a Unix or on Windows? This has been my experience too on Windows,
both the initial startup of Julia and the loading of packages was pretty slow
(this was in 0.4.2 I believe).

> It has macro, if only it has lisp syntax...

Honestly, it's a language whose audience is at least 50% non-professional-
programmers (scientists, engineers, statisticians), so with a lisp-y syntax it
would probably have died a sputtering death. There's a lot of other things to
love about the language though, whether superficial (being able to say `2y +
3` or `if a ≠ b && e ∈ S` if you wanted to), practical (pretty good FFIs to C,
C++, Python, MATLAB _and_ R already, decent-sized and quickly growing package
repo), theoretical (mutliple dispatch, the type system).

~~~
stonemetal
To me it seems like it is professional programmers who are stodgy about their
syntax. Non pros aren't as fussy when presented with something non standard
because they haven't been married to the standard for 20 years.

~~~
eggy
I like to do math in C, J, Forth or Scheme which all have different syntax and
a combination of prefix, postfix and infix.

I would like a Lisp syntax too, and you can go into Lisp in Julia, since
initially it used femtolisp written by Jeff Bezanson (one of the creators of
Julia). I am not sure how much functionality is available from the Lisp prompt
in the console. There's also a Lisp syntax package for it IIRC.

I am waiting for it to stabilize more, and then I'll revisit it. I like now
that I have the choice of zero-indexing, since I am used to that from
mathematics, C, and J, although APL gives a switch to choose between 0 or 1
indexing.

------
boromi
duplicate of:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12535072)

