Julia 1.6 Highlights
Julia version 1.6 has been released. Most Julia releases are timed and hence not planned around specific features, but this release was an exception since it is likely to become the next long-term support (LTS) release of Julia. Because of this, we took extra time developing the release to make sure that features which are needed for the future health of the ecosystem made it into the release. Also, the release was tested for regressions against all registered open source packages and issues were tracked down and fixed. The final decision about whether Julia 1.6 will become the new LTS will be made after it has been battle-tested in the field, around the time of the 1.7 release enters stabilization. The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS file, but here we'll give a more in-depth overview of some of the release highlights.
Executing all of the statements in a module often involves compiling a large amount of code, so Julia creates precompiled caches of the module to reduce this time. In 1.6, this package precompilation is faster and happens before you leave pkg> mode. Until now, precompilation took place solely as a single-processed sequence, precompiling dependencies one-by-one when needed during the linear code loading process when a package is using/import-ed for the first time.
