Julia 1.5 has been released

Version 1.5 of the Julia programming language has been released. On the Julia blog, Jeff Bezanson and Stefan Karpinski describe the highlights of the release, which includes struct layout improvements for decreasing heap allocations, stabilization of the multithreading API, faster random numbers, changes to the scoping rules in the read-eval-print loop (REPL), and more. "Julia excels at simulations, so random numbers are important to a lot of users of the language. For this release Rafael Fourquet, one of the primary architects of the Random standard library and a prolific contributor in general, implemented some impressive algorithmic improvements for some popular cases. The first is a major improvement when generating normally-distributed double-precision floats. Calling randn(1000) is nearly twice as fast in Julia 1.5 compared with Julia 1.4. Generating random booleans also got much faster: rand(Bool, 1000) is nearly 6x faster. Finally, sampling from discrete collections has also gotten faster: rand(1:100, 1000) got 25% faster." LWN looked at Julia (part 1, part 2) back in 2018, shortly after the release of Julia 1.0.