Compat Package for Julia

The Compat package is designed to ease interoperability between older and newer versions of the Julia language. In particular, in cases where it is impossible to write code that works with both the latest Julia master branch and older Julia versions, or impossible to write code that doesn't generate a deprecation warning in some Julia version, the Compat package provides a macro that lets you use the latest syntax in a backwards-compatible way.

This is primarily intended for use by other Julia packages, where it is important to maintain cross-version compatibility.

Usage

To use Compat in your Julia package, add a line Compat to the REQUIRE file in your package directory. Then, in your package, after a using Compat statement to load Compat, simply use:

@compat ...Julia master syntax...

wherever you want to use syntax that differs in the latest Julia master (the development version of Julia).

Supported syntax

Currently, the @compat macro supports the following syntaxes:

• @compat Dict(foo => bar, baz => qux) - type-inferred Dict construction.

• @compat Dict{Foo,Bar}(foo => bar, baz => qux) - type-declared Dict construction.

• @compat split(str, splitter; keywords...) - the Julia 0.4-style keyword-based split function

• @compat rsplit(str, splitter; keywords...) - the Julia 0.4-style keyword-based rsplit function

Type Aliases

• typealias AbstractString String - String has been renamed to AbstractString #8872

• For all unsigned integer types to their equivalents with uppercase I. #8907

Renamed functions

• itrunc, iround, iceil, ifloor are now accessed via trunc(T, x), etc. #9133

• Base.Random.randmtzig_exprnd is now randexp #9144

• sizehint is now sizehint! #9278

New macros

• @inline and @noinline have been added. On 0.3, these are "no-ops," meaning they don't actually do anything.

Other syntax changes

• Dict(ks, vs) is now Dict(zip(ks, vs)) #8521

Developer tips

If you're adding additional compatibility code to this package, the following shell script is a useful for extracting the version number from a git commit SHA:

#! /bin/bash
last_tag=$(git describe --tags --abbrev=0)
git rev-list $1 ^$last_tag | wc -l | sed -e 's/[^[:digit:]]//g'