NEWS.md

Julia v1.1 Release Notes

New language features

• An exception stack is maintained on each task to make exception handling more robust and enable root cause analysis. The stack may be accessed using the experimental function Base.catch_stack (#28878).
• The experimental macro Base.@locals returns a dictionary of current local variable names and values (#29733).

Language changes

• Parser inputs ending with a comma are now consistently treated as incomplete. Previously they were sometimes parsed as tuples, depending on whitespace (#28506).
• Spaces were accidentally allowed in broadcast call syntax, e.g. f. (x). They are now disallowed, consistent with normal function call syntax (#29781).
• Big integer literals and command syntax (backticks) are now parsed with the name of the macro (@int128_str, @uint128_str, @big_str, @cmd) qualified to refer to the Core module (#29968).
• Using the same name for both a local variable and a static parameter is now an error instead of a warning (#29429).
• findall(in(b), a) now returns a CartesianIndex when a is a matrix or a higher-dimensional array, for consistency with other findall methods. Use LinearIndices(a)[findall(in(b), a)] to get the old behavior, or CartesianIndices(a)[findall(in(b), a)] to get the new behavior on previous Julia versions ([#30226]).
• findmin(::BitArray) and findmax(::BitArray) now return a CartesianIndex when a is a matrix or a higher-dimensional array, for consistency with for other array types. Use LinearIndices(a)[findmin(a)[2]] to get the old behavior, or CartesianIndices(a)[findmin(a)[2]] to get the new behavior on previous Julia versions ([#30102]).
• Method signatures such as f(::Type{T}, ::T) where {T <: X} and f(::Type{X}, ::Any) are now considered ambiguous. Previously a bug caused the first one to be considered more specific ([#30160]).

Command-line option changes

• When a script run in interactive mode (-i) throws an error, the REPL now starts after the error is displayed. Previously the REPL only started if the script completed without error (#21233).

New library functions

• splitpath(p::String) function, which is the opposite of joinpath(parts...): it splits a filepath into its components (#28156).
• isnothing(::Any) function, to check whether something is a Nothing, returns a Bool (#29679).
• getpid(::Process) method (#24064).
• eachrow, eachcol and eachslice functions provide efficient iterators over slices of arrays (#29749).
• fieldtypes(T::Type) which return the declared types of the field in type T (#29600).
• uuid5 has been added to the UUIDs standard library (#28761).
• Predicate functions Sys.isfreebsd, Sys.isopenbsd, Sys.isnetbsd, and Sys.isdragonfly for detecting BSD systems have been added (#30249).
• Internal Base.disable_library_threading that sets libraries to use one thread. It executes function hooks that have been registered with Base.at_disable_library_threading ([#30004]).

Standard library changes

• CartesianIndices can now be constructed from two CartesianIndexes I and J with I:J (#29440).
• CartesianIndices support broadcasting arithmetic (+ and -) with a CartesianIndex (#29890).
• copy! support for arrays, dicts, and sets has been moved to Base from the Future package (#29173).
• Channels now convert inserted values (like containers) instead of requiring types to match (#29092).
• range can accept the stop value as a positional argument, e.g. range(1,10,step=2) (#28708).
• diff now supports arrays of arbitrary dimensionality and can operate over any dimension (#29827).
• The constructor BigFloat(::BigFloat) now respects the global precision setting and always returns a BigFloat with precision equal to precision(BigFloat) (#29127). The optional precision argument to override the global setting is now a keyword instead of positional argument (#29157).
• The use of scientific notation when printing BigFloat values is now consistent with other floating point types (#29211).
• Regex now behave like a scalar when used in broadcasting (#29913).
• Char now behaves like a read-only 0-dimensional array (#29819).
• parse now allows strings representing integer 0 and 1 for type Bool (#29980).
• Base.tail now works on named tuples (#29595).
• The process id is appended to malloc log files in order to track memory allocations of multiple processes (#29969).
• Base.julia_cmd now propagates the --inline=(yes|no) flag (#29858).
• Base.@kwdef can now be used for parametric structs, and for structs with supertypes (#29316).
• merge(::NamedTuple, ::NamedTuple...) can now be used with more than 2 NamedTuples (#29259).
• Future.copy! has been moved to Base (#29178).
• New ncodeunits(c::Char) method as a fast equivalent to ncodeunits(string(c)) (#29153).
• New sort!(::AbstractArray; dims) method that can sort the array along the dims dimension (#28902).
• range now accept stop as a positional argument (#28708).
• get(A::AbstractArray, (), default) now returns the result of A[] if it can instead of always returning an empty array ([#30270]).
• parse(Bool, str) is now supported (#29997).
• copyto!(::AbstractMatrix, ::UniformScaling) supports rectangular matrices now (#28790).
• In put!(c::Channel{T}, v), v now gets converted to T as put! is being called (#29092).
• current_project() now searches the parent directories of a Git repository for a Project.toml file. This also affects the behavior of the --project command line option when using the default --project=@. (#29108).
• The spawn API is now more flexible and supports taking IOBuffer directly as a I/O stream, converting to a system pipe as needed ([#30278]).

Dates

• New DateTime(::Date, ::Time) constructor (#29754).
• TimeZone now behave like a scalar when used in broadcasting (#30159).

InteractiveUtils

• edit can now be called on a module to edit the file that defines it (#29636).
• All compiler-reflection tools (i.e. the code_ class of functions and macros) now print accurate line number and inlining information in a common style, and take an optional parameter (debuginfo=:default) to control the verbosity of the metadata shown (#29893).

LinearAlgebra

• isdiag and isposdef for Diagonal and UniformScaling (#29638).
• mul!, rmul! and lmul! methods for UniformScaling (#29506).
• Symmetric and Hermitian matrices now preserve the wrapper when scaled with a number (#29469).
• Exponentiation operator ^ now supports raising a Irrational to an AbstractMatrix power (#29782).

Random

• randperm and randcycle now use the type of their argument to determine the element type of the returned array (#29670).
• A new method rand(::Tuple) implements sampling from the values of a tuple (#25278).
• serialize and deserialize now accept a filename argument, like write and read ([#30151]).

SparseArrays

• sprandn now supports specifying the output element type (#30083).

Statistics

• mean and var now handles the empty case (#29033).

External dependencies

• 7zip (bundled with Julia on Windows) has been upgraded from version 16.04 to 18.05 (#30035).
• Busybox is no longer bundled with Julia on Windows (#30022).
• OpenBLAS has been upgraded from 0.3.2 to 0.3.3 (#29845).
• The source code for Pkg is no longer included in JuliaLang/julia. Pkg is instead downloaded during the build process (#29615).
• LLVM has been upgraded to 6.0.1 and support for LLVM < 6.0 has been dropped (#28745, #28696).

Deprecated or removed

• one(i::CartesianIndex) should be replaced with oneunit(i::CartesianIndex) (#29442).
• The internal array Base.Grisu.DIGITS is deprecated; new code should use Base.Grisu.getbuf() to get an appropriate task-local buffer and pass it to grisu() instead (#29907).
• The internal function Base._default_type(T) has been removed. Calls to it should be replaced with just the argument T (#29739).
• peakflops has been scheduled to move from InteractiveUtils to LinearAlgebra but is already now available as LinearAlgebra.peakflops (#29978).