[blindseer]

If I may Viral, I suspect one takeaway from Yuri's criticism (at least it was a takeaway for me) is that with multiple dispatch correctness bugs like the ones listed are hard to find (impossible even). How would you respond to that criticism?

In my opinion, better tooling to assist with such cases would help tremendously. Adding support for interfaces to `Base` would be a great start. What are your thoughts about this?

Also, it's been a while since we've seen a roadmap on what the core team is working on? What are the next big features we can expect from the language and what is the approximate timeline for that? Having answers to these questions would be extremely helpful.

[ViralBShah]

The issue is not that the bugs are with correctness of multiple dispatch, but that multiple dispatch allows you to combine generic programming with abstract data types. Thus, one can have a generic implementation in base Julia, and someone can pass a new user data type - a combination that can easily not work. Some of the frustration also arises from types such as OffsetArrays that are included in the base distribution, but not as well supported and tested as the regular Arrays type. Thus, the discussion here tends to focus on defining interfaces, and of course on better testing of uncommonly used data types.

In general, we've not had a formal roadmap - but we present a "State of Julia" talk at JuliaCon every year. But very broadly, the list (of the top of my head) includes: improving a lot of the underlying compiler infrastructure overall, improving support differentiable programming, improving garbage collection, support for GPUs from multiple vendors (too many of those now), supporting apple silicon, type system support for tools like JET.jl.

NEWS.md is generally updated during the course of a release cycle, which eventually becomes release notes, and then post release, we put together a highlights blog post. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/NEWS.md

[amkkma]

Thanks.

regarding "improving a lot of the underlying compiler infrastructure overall"

Is the compiler plugin project still active/ planned?

[ViralBShah]

It is still planned, but I'll defer to Keno and others to chime in on the details.

[sgt101]

>If I may Viral, I suspect one takeaway from Yuri's criticism (at least it was a takeaway for me) is that with multiple dispatch correctness bugs like the ones listed are hard to find (impossible even).

Maybe one approach would be for the community to create some certification tests. Although this wouldn't help with corner cases it would allow packages to run some testing that (if the tests are good) might throw up problems with constitutionality? Also if there were bugs from composition the certificate could be suspended until they were fixed.

[Sukera]

I may be missing some context, but what correctness bugs exactly are you referring to that are caused by multiple dispatch?

[orthoxerox]

Dependently typed arrays/lists/vectors with explicit lower/upper bounds would've prevented the errorneous assumption that you can iterate over any axis from 1 to length inclusive.

[Sukera]

True in principle, but that is neither related to multiple dispatch nor a common feature in other languages. Dependent typing is very much active research in PL academia. The @inbounds kerfuffle was all about incorrectly using a tool that's explicitly documented to take off the existing bounds checking safety, similar to `unsafe` blocks in Rust. So even with dependent types, if you explicitly opt out of those checks, they wouldn't have helped.

[abhimanyuaryan]

@blindseer I recommend start writing for your code. Tests are important you should not skip them. Julia vs no Julia

[blindseer]

Did you mean to reply to me? Or perhaps another comment of mine? If not, I don't follow.

Edit:

It looks like abhimanyuaryan is blindly spamming suggestions to write tests in this thread (???). This is a case where I agree in principle but their comments are completely beside the point and not relevant to the context of the comment or the post.

[abhimanyuaryan]

sorry for confusion what just pointing to one of recommendations from the blog post that I thought you mind wanna re-consider to overcome "multiple dispatch correctness bugs" i.e. "I'd say that there is a huge combination of packages that can be used together providing the language with an enormous amount of possibilities. It is up to the programmer to verify the interaction before use and, preferably, add tests to one of the packages." Yuri's criticism of composability came from packages as Viral already mentioned