Julia v1.6 Release Notes

New language features

Types written with where syntax can now be used to define constructors, e.g. (Foo{T} where T)(x) = ....

Language changes

Compiler/Runtime improvements

All platforms can now use @executable_path within jl_load_dynamic_library(). This allows executable-relative paths to be embedded within executables on all platforms, not just MacOS, which the syntax is borrowed from. ([#35627])

Command-line option changes

Multi-threading changes

Build system changes

New library functions

New function Base.kron! and corresponding overloads for various matrix types for performing Kronecker product in-place. ([#31069]).
New function Base.Threads.foreach(f, channel::Channel) for multithreaded Channel consumption. ([#34543]).

New library features

Standard library changes

The nextprod function now accepts tuples and other array types for its first argument ([#35791]).
The function isapprox(x,y) now accepts the norm keyword argument also for numeric (i.e., non-array) arguments x and y ([#35883]).
view, @view, and @views now work on AbstractStrings, returning a SubString when appropriate ([#35879]).
All AbstractUnitRange{<:Integer}s now work with SubString, view, @view and @views on strings ([#35879]).
sum, prod, maximum, and minimum now support init keyword argument ([#36188], [#35839]).

LinearAlgebra

New method LinearAlgebra.issuccess(::CholeskyPivoted) for checking whether pivoted Cholesky factorization was successful ([#36002]).
UniformScaling can now be indexed into using ranges to return dense matrices and vectors ([#24359]).

Markdown

Random

REPL

SparseArrays

Display large sparse matrices with a Unicode "spy" plot of their nonzero patterns, and display small sparse matrices by an Matrix-like 2d layout of their contents.

Dates

Statistics

Sockets

Distributed

UUIDs

Change uuid1 and uuid4 to use Random.RandomDevice() as default random number generator ([#35872]).

Deprecated or removed

External dependencies

Tooling Improvements