Major breaking changes

As anticipated from last week’s integer arithmetic change, the usage of itrunc to truncate integers into a specific type has been removed. Since this is intrinsically a modular arithmetic calculation, rem is now the way to do this, with the idiomatic syntax being 1234 % Uint8 == 0xd2. (#8648)

New proposals

Several new proposals (juleps) were submitted this week.

Given that convert is one of the most heavily used functions in Julia, a renewed conversation about using x as Foo as sugar for convert(Foo, x)::Foo was started in #8710.
@StefanKarpinski put together a coherent story for how APL-style indexing and lazy transpose behaviors could be combined to solve some of the current inconsistencies (like the double-transpose of a vector not being a vector, and vector dot products being one-element arrays). #4774

@JeffBezanson managed to get the call-overload branch passing tests! A few questions remain before it can get merged, though. #8712.
And a postscript from last week: an intrepid group has managed to successfully build julia with MSVC. I missed including it last week, but I think it’s worthy of a note. See #7761 for details.

A new compatibility package, Compat.jl, was created to help package authors transition to the new syntaxes in 0.4. See the users list announcement for more details.
A new package, GeometricalPredicates.jl, provides fast, robust 2D and 3D geometrical predicates on generic point types. See the announcement on the julia-users mailing list for more details for more details and some snazzy images: