MIT-developed Julia has become one of the world’s fastest-growing programming languages. Last year it teamed with a supercomputer to catalogue 200 million astronomical objects within 15 minutes — one thousand times faster than the previous rate.

At this week’s JuliaCon 2018 in London, UK, Julia Computing released Julia 1.0 during the Reception Founders Talk. The Julia team says the 1.0 release is “the most important Julia milestone since Julia was introduced in February 2012”. Julia 1.0 is expected to deliver increased speed comparable to C++ with the high productivity and ease of use of Python and R.

As the first complete and stable version of Julia, the most significant new feature is “a commitment to language API stability”, which means code written for Julia 1.0 will continue to work in subsequent versions. The 1.0 release is also equipped with new features, including a built-in package manager, a canonical representation for missing values, and better support for the built-in string type to hold arbitrary data, etc. More details can be found in the documentation.

Screenshot from julialang.org

Julia is a high-level dynamic programming language first developed by researchers from MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). Julia currently has more than two million downloads and the corresponding developers’ community has produced more than 1900 libraries including a variety of mathematical tools. It is easy to import libraries from Python, R, C/C++, and Java into Julia, which greatly extends the language’s scope of application.

Download Julia 1.0 Here