What's coming in Elixir 1.3

Elixir 1.3 adds several language and tooling changes that aim to make code more consistent, easier to refactor, and easier to inspect. The post also notes a few deprecations that may produce warnings in existing projects.

Reading notes

#

• Imperative assignment is being deprecated so all special forms can move toward simpler, more consistent scoping rules, even if that means a little extra verbosity in some cases.
• with gains else for handling error cases and guards, which makes nested control flow and error processing easier to express.
• New date and time types are added to the standard library, improving interoperability between libraries that previously used different date packages.
• escript can now be installed from a URL, and Mix gets tasks for listing and uninstalling installed escripts.
• ExUnit gets a readable diff for failed tests, and String.myers_difference/2 supports that feature.
• A make compiler is added for projects that need it, especially libraries that distribute NIFs.
• defdelegate deprecates list usage and :append_first, while allowing optional parameters in delegates.
• Process.sleep/1 is added, but the post recommends using it mainly for retry delays rather than waiting on tasks or monitoring processes.
• OTP optional_callbacks is supported so behaviour modules can define defaults and implementations can keep only the required callbacks.
• New Mix tasks deps.tree and app.tree show dependency and application trees.
• The post ends by encouraging regular compilation against Elixir master to catch deprecations early.