Erlang/OTP 21.0 was just released and work on the upcoming Elixir v1.7 release is ongoing. In this post, we highlight some of the features that have already landed in the Elixir master branch.

• Elixir will now provide hints of where a mistake may have happened when you forget a do or an end (commit).

• Erlang/OTP 21.0 introduces a new way to retrieve the stacktrace that is lexically scoped and no longer relies on side-effects like System.stacktrace/0 does. Elixir v1.7 will bring this feature to Elixir developers via the __STACKTRACE__ special form. You can track other changes related to Erlang/OTP 21.0 in its own issue.

• The Calendar module also got some improvements, such as the addition of months_in_year/1 and support for negative dates.

• ExUnit has also seen its own share of improvements. Failures in doctests are now colored and diffed. Assertions such as assert some_fun(arg1, arg2, arg3) will now include the value of each argument in the failure report. mix test now supports the --failed flag that runs all tests that failed in the previous run, and mix test --cover now includes a coverage summary out of the box.

For the complete list of changes, see the CHANGELOG. To keep track of upcoming changes and even contribute some features yourself, head to Elixir’s issues tracker.

You can also meet the Elixir team and learn more about Elixir v1.7 and its future at ElixirConf.

Have fun!