Version 5.0.1 of the math-, science-, and data-analysis-focused distribution for Python uses newly recompiled binaries
Anaconda, the Python language distribution and work environment for scientific computing, data science, statistical analysis, and machine learning, is now available in a broadly revised 5.0 edition.
Version 5.0.1, released this week, addresses some minor bugs and adds useful features, such as updated R language support, that weren’t available in the original 5.0.0 release.
The community edition of Anaconda Distribution is available for free download directly from Anaconda’s website. The for-pay enterprise edition, with professional support, requires contacting Anaconda’s (formerly Continuum Analytics) sales team.
The Linux and MacOS versions of Anaconda 5 have been built with new compilers: GCC 7.2 for Linux and Clang 4..01 for MacOS. This extends the speed benefits of those compilers to users of earlier editions of those OSes—to MacOS 10.9 Mavericks and CentOS 6.
Anaconda 5 also provides Python packages rebuilt with the new compiler, through its package-management tool conda. However, for the time being, those rebuilt packages are available through a different installation channel.
Anaconda’s long-term plan is to make that new installation channel the default, as more packages get added to the new channel and as users obtain the newly optimized packages and give them a shakedown.
Anaconda’s conda tool simplifies installing Python packages used in stats and data analysis, because many of those packages have complex binary dependencies. Conda-forge is a GitHub organization where users can share packages, build recipes, and distributions of projects built for conda.
Some 3,200 packages from Conda-forge are available in their own package list. Among some of the most recently updated:
Anaconda’s strategy moving foward is to use Conda-forge as its source for build recipes, both for consistency’s sake and to allow a broader range of third-party packages to be used in Anaconda.
Also new in the latest version of Anaconda:
