On behalf of the GDL team, we will be glad to use the occasion of ADASS 2018 to announce the 1.0 release of GDL - GNU Data Language. GDL is the free and open-source drop-in replacement for IDL - Interactive Data Language. The 1.0 release, coming out 15 years after Marc Schellens has first made GDL public, marks several milestones attesting to the maturity of the project. Among these - as compared with versions presented at the previous editions of ADASS - there are updates in the plotting functionalities, major advancements in the Windows version of GDL, rewritten support for IDL save files, multi-threaded performance improvements and additions targeting compatibility with newer versions of IDL (including new data types). GDL 1.0 is also the first major release following the move of GDL development from SourceForge (thank you for the last 15 years of hospitality!) to Github. This relocation was an occasion for a major effort targeting developer-workflow-oriented automation which helps us reduce entry barriers for new contributions, ensure increasing code coverage with automatic tests, facilitate maintenance and user support as well as ensure result reproducibility and traceability. Several of the lessons learn, insights gained and remaining challenges related with the development of the continuous integration process for the project will be reported. Finally, the presentation will summarize current availability of packaged versions of GDL, compatibility with popular IDL-written astronomy-related software, potential directions for the upcoming releases, and the key areas where GDL could benefit from further user feedback and new contributions.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): P6-4.pdf