Programming Language “Julia 1.4” Released
March 22, programming language “Julia” development team released the latest version “Julia 1.4”.
Julia is an open-source language that covers from general purposes to high-performance computation. It is basically a dynamic-typed language, although incorporated with static-language features like annotation. It allows compiling to native code, and its processing speed is very fast. It provides features such as asynchronous I/O, debugging, logging, profiling, and package manager. It is licensed under the MIT License.
Julia 1.4 is a point release of GA 1.0 released in August 2018. It introduces new language features. For example, it now allows quoted symbols in import statements, like “import Base.:+”.
One of the new library functions is “only(x)”, which returns the one-and-only element. Takewhile, dropwhile, and accumulate are added to the Iterators submodule. Also added is the evalpoly function, which takes the role of @evalpoly macro. It brings further flexibility and efficiency.
As a way of returning package root directory of a module or submodule, “pkgdir(ModuleName)” is introduced, which is simpler than “dirname(dirname(pathof(ModuleName)))”.
Windows build installer has been switched to Inno Setup, and installer command line parameters have been changed as well.