Elixir v1.5 includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes. While Elixir v1.4 focused on tools for concurrency and scalability, Elixir v1.5 brings many improvements to the developer experience and quality of life. As we will see, many of those are powered by the latest Erlang/OTP 20. This is also the last Elixir release that supports Erlang/OTP 18.

The focus on “developer experience and quality of life” in this release really speaks to the growing maturity of Elixir as a language. The improvements to breakpoints in IEx, as well as the newly added Exception.blame/3 function both sound like they’ll make the experience of debugging Elixir code a lot more pleasant, with the latter making it easier for libraries like Phoenix and Plug to provide more helpful exception output. Overall a solid release of a language I really enjoy working with.