Julia 1.1 Adds Array Alternative
Written by Kay Ewbank   
Thursday, 17 October 2024

Julia 1.1 has been released with improvements including a new Memory type that provides a lower-level container as an alternative to Array.

Julia is a dynamic language for technical computing optimized for running MATLAB and R-style programs. Development began on Julia at MIT in 2009, and has increased in popularity, recently becoming one of the top six languages for machine learning projects on GitHub.

.julialogo1

The first improvement to the new release is the new Memory type. Until now, Array was a special object in Julia, meaning that operations such as resizing and creation of arrays had to be done completely in C, which added overheads and made some of the code much harder to write and difficult for the compiler to optimize. This update adds a new, lower level Memory type, which made it possible for the developers to re-implement all of the Array object in Julia code on top of it. The Memory type also supports working with some data types such as Dict that don't need all of Array's features, which the team says has led to some great performance improvements.

The new version also adds a new public keyword designed to indicate that an unexported name is part of the public API. The need for this is to make it clear whether an unexported name is considered part of the public API. Until now, the guideline was that if it was not in the manual then it was not public.

Manifest versioning has also been added to this release, making it easier to manage environments where you want to have multiple Julia versions at the same time. There's also a new runtime supported datatype called ScopedValues that provides an alternative to globals for configuration parameters.

A final improvement of note is improvements to tab completion and hinting in the REPL. Tab completion now has inline hinting when there is a singular completion available that can be completed with tab.

Julia 1.11 is available now.

julialogo1

More Information

Julia Website

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Julia 1.9 Adds Native Code Caching

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Julia Language Creators Awarded Numerical Software Prize

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