Erlang/OTP 17.0-rc1 has been released.

This is an alpha release, which will be followed by a planned beta release about a month later and a final OTP 17.0 product release in the end of March, 2014.

Between the alpha and beta and final release there will be new updates of the master branch with corrections and minor new features. Occasionally there might be new tags which we in that case will communicate and ask you to test.

Erlang/OTP 17.0 is a new major release with new features, quite a few (characteristics) improvements, as well as some incompatibilities. See the README file and the documentation for more details.

We would like to ask you to download and test the alpha release and send us your feedback as soon as possible, so that we can make the necessary corrections before OTP 17.0-rc2 and OTP 17.0, respectively.

The release contains many changes; thus, some unexpected incompatibilities or issues may have slipped through our tests. Please try to build and run your current products/applications and let us know about any problems.

Note! The new datatype MAP is not properly documented yet but the EEP 43 https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0043.html will provide a good start. Also note that it is a limited implementation of maps implemented so far:

no variable keys are allowed

native code can not be generated for modules using maps

Some other highlights of the release are:

Maps, a new dictionary data type (experimental)

A more natural mapping from ASN.1 OCTET STRING and BIT STRING to Erlang types, and other ASN.1 improvements and optimizations

The {active, N} socket option for TCP, UDP, and SCTP

A new (optional) scheduler utilization balancing mechanism

Migration of memory carriers has been enabled by default on all ERTS internal memory allocators

Increased garbage collection tenure rate

Experimental "dirty schedulers" functionality

Funs can now be given names

Miscellaneous unicode support enhancements

A new, semantic version scheme for OTP and its applications

You can find the README file with more detailed info at http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_17.0-rc1.readme

You can download the full source distribution from http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_17.0-rc1.tar.gz

Note: To unpack the TAR archive you need a GNU TAR compatible program. For installation instructions please read the README that is part of the distribution.

You can also find this release at the official Erlang/OTP Git-repository at Github here: https://github.com/erlang/otp tagged *OTP_17.0-rc1*

The Windows binary distribution can be downloaded from http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_win32_17.0-rc1.exe http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_win64_17.0-rc1.exe

You can also download the complete HTML documentation or the Unix manual files http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_doc_html_17.0-rc1.tar.gz http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_17.0-rc1.tar.gz

We also want to thank those that sent us patches, suggestions and bug reports.

The Erlang/OTP Team at Ericsson