Hello folks,

Elixir v1.4.0-rc.0 has been released. This is a release candidate for the upcoming Elixir v1.4.0.

The most notable changes are the addition of the Registry module and the Task.async_stream/3 and Task.async_stream/5 which aid developers in writing concurrent software. Overall this is the smallest release since Elixir v1.0 and that’s also a feature!

You can find more information about this release in the CHANGELOG: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.4/CHANGELOG.md

With this release we are also officially moving the docs for Elixir and friends to Hexdocs: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.4.0-rc.0 - this provides a unified doc experience throughout the ecosystem and the ability to version all versions (so far we kept only the latest of each branch).

Please give Elixir v1.4 a try. Since it is a prerelease it may not be available in package managers but you can easily use the precompiled packages as explained here: http://elixir-lang.org/install.html#precompiled-package

Finally, as with previous releases, this release includes new warnings. So please update your libraries and if your dependencies are emitting warnings, please update them when appropriate and send pull requests when possible.

FAQ

How frequent are Elixir releases?

Elixir releases have been happening in an interval of 6 months. This has been true since Elixir v1.1. For this reason, we are officially planning to have a new minor release every 6 months. It is not a hard rule, if necessary we will release earlier, or later if nothing worthwhile has been added to master, but that’s the timeline we will work with.

What about GenStage?

The Elixir Core has discussed and agreed to not include GenStage as part of Elixir. That’s actually good news for GenStage: it became obvious in the last months that GenStage has grown beyond our expectations. By keeping GenStage and Flow as separate projects, we will have more flexibility in evolving both.

In any case, we will continue with our plans to remove GenEvent from Elixir Core in the long term. While GenStage and Elixir’s v1.4 registry can be used as replacements, known tools such as Supervisor and GenServers may do the job as well, as I have recently written on Plataformatec’s blog: http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/11/replacing-genevent-by-a-supervisor-genserver/

Once Elixir v1.4.0 (final) is released, we will announce the full plans for GenStage and Flow and how they will relate to future Elixir versions.