Julia 1.13 released with 30% faster precompilation
Original: Julia 1.13 highlights
Why This Matters
Faster TTFX and native REPL tooling directly address Julia's two longest-standing friction points for new and daily users.
The Julia contributors released Julia 1.13 on September 10, 2026, delivering approximately 30% faster package precompilation vs. 1.12, ~20% faster startup, built-in REPL syntax highlighting, fzf-style history search, and a switch from gzip to zstd as the default Pkg compression algorithm.
Julia 1.13 ships with a broad set of performance and usability improvements. Precompilation is roughly 30% faster than 1.12 and 10-20% faster than the 1.10 LTS release, depending on hardware. Startup time dropped ~20% — benchmarks show 56.7 ms vs. 69.1 ms for an empty evaluation. The Julia team is now tracking Time To First X (TTFX) metrics continuously via perf.julialang.org/ttfx, with new CI jobs running on every pull request and master commit; systematic tracking went live September 7, 2026.
On the REPL side, syntax highlighting ships natively for the first time — no longer requiring OhMyREPL.jl — with a conservative default scheme and support for custom themes like Monokai. The Ctrl-R history search is redesigned to work like fzf, supporting fuzzy matching, multi-select, REPL-mode indicators, and inline syntax highlighting. Windows users also gain bracketed paste support.
New language features include the @__FUNCTION__ macro, hashing changes, a faster garbage collector that skips image objects during marking, and a new --trace-eval flag for tracing top-level evaluation. Pkg switches its default compression from gzip to zstd, adds registry support for manifest-tracked packages, and pkg> add now attempts to match already-loaded package versions. Pkg.test no longer enforces strict bounds checking by default.