Elixir 1.5 released

Congrats to the Elixir core dev team for another fine release. The improvements to iEX's debugging capabilities are going to make a big difference to day-to-day developer UX. Thanks!

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#5

Post by josevalim » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:11 AM UTC

Official announcement: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2017/07/25/elixir-v1-5-0-releas...

We have published a draft version of the announcement since the release notes are not super helpful for those unfamiliar with Elixir. Is it possible to update the link to the official announcement? Thank you!

EDIT: We are done with the changes on the draft. We've added asciicinema snippets to show some features, improved the section on Calendar changes and also mentioned the compilation time improvements (expect at least 10% faster compilation).

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#6

Post by FlyingSnake » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:14 AM UTC

Elixir is truly an under-appreciated language. I've only toyed with it, and I'm really impressed with the whole ecosystem. Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, Hex, etc all make a great ecosystem, and the awesomeness that is BEAM/OTP is just amazing. I loved the hot code deploys, and updating a system while it's running is something I've never seen before in action. Also Rustler is a great way to write CPU intensive NIF code too.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#7

Post by xiaq » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:20 AM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #3

saurik wrote: post #2

"Using () to mean nil is deprecated" <- interesting.

I'm just starting to use elixir and I'm curious, when would one use `()` in place of `nil`?

AFAIK it is a notation present in both the Lisp family and the ML family. In Lisp it means an empty list, and some dialects conflate it with nil. In ML it is a 0-tuple, but I don't know enough ML to say its relationship with nil but it seems tempting to conflate them as well.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#8

Post by olavolav » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:23 AM UTC

That, great news, I'm especially curious about this line here:

[ExUnit] Show code snippet from test source file in case of test errors

ExUnit backtraces have historically been a bit hard to read sometimes IMHO.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#9

Post by cooervo » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:24 AM UTC

Good news from elixir and erlang

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#10

Post by keymone » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:25 AM UTC

whitepoplar wrote: post #3

saurik wrote: post #2

"Using () to mean nil is deprecated" <- interesting.

I'm just starting to use elixir and I'm curious, when would one use `()` in place of `nil`?

it's one of the controversial points in lisp dialects. treating empty list as nil means it's falsey when used as predicate which has it's pros and cons.

for instance if empty list is truthy, this pseudocode won't terminate if tail is defined to always be a (possibly empty) list:

    while seq:
        head, seq = seq.head_tail()
        f(head)