Though it is less visible than the changes in the blog post, I'm also happy about the possibility introduced in 1.8 of removing LLVM from the runtime to create a smaller Julia runtime.<p>Not to mention the new effect system, which allows for quite aggressive constant propagation and constant evaluation.<p>Then there are a few small things: The new `eachsplit` function, for example, or the ability to read a file line by line, backwards, the introduction of "lazy strings" that makes writing informative errors more performant and the ability to match regular expressions to error messages in tests.<p>The real big one is the latency reduction, though, and the promise that it brings in the future for caching native code - perhaps in v 1.10 or even 1.9