The focus on this release is mostly speed. By switching to using tcmalloc in windows some scripts get very substantial performance gains, in some extreme cases over 200% speedup but don’t expect it in every clip. Other parts of the code were also steamlined and cleaned up for some additional minor gains.
The other highlight is as usual bugfixes, a pile of small and annoying things have been fixed and there is now full documentation of the API available. Something most open source projects don’t manage to do ever (sprinkling doxygen everywhere doesn’t count unless it’s readable).
Important script writing detail
If you write a python module with functions to be imported into another script DO NOT store the core object in global scope. This will cause odd behavior since the global scope is only evaluated once but a new core is provided every time a script is reloaded. The result is that you will have two or more cores in the same script and most likely crash or get an error.