The latest version of Julia has been released with what has been described as a sweeping overhaul of the type system and numerous improvements to syntax and to the standard library.

Julia is a dynamic language for technical computing that is especially good at running MATLAB and R-style programs. Development began on Julia at MIT in 2009 by Professor of Computer Science Alan Edelman with Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral B. Shah.

The 0.6 release line is now considered the stable line of releases and is recommended for most users, as it provides both language and API stability.

The changes to the type system sees new capabilities added, so that Type parameter constraints can now refer to previous parameters. Support for implicit type parameters has been added, and there's also a new array syntax that allows a union of types over all specified values,so providing behavior similar to parametric methods. 

You can now use implicit type parameters, and the new release has more accurate subtype and type intersection algorithms.This has resulted in better method sorting and identification of equivalent and ambiguous methods. 

Language changes include changes to the keywords used to define types, and the deprecation of the "Inner constructor" syntax for parametric types.Multi-line and single-line nonstandard command literals have been added, and nonstandard string and command literals can now be qualified with their module.

The new release coincides with news that Julia Computing, the company behind Julia, has been granted $910,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support open-source Julia development, including $160,000 to promote diversity in the Julia community.

The grant will support Julia training, adoption, usability, compilation, package development, tooling and documentation.

More Information

Julia On Github

Julia Computing 

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