What's New in IDL 8.8

New Features
Updates
Library Updates
See Also

For links to What's New information for other IDL 8.x releases, go to See Also.

New Features

IDL Workbench

New to IDL is that you can install the Eclipse Marketplace Client in the IDL Workbench. The Eclipse Marketplace Client is an interface that allows you to browse and install Eclipse-based plug-ins. See Install the Marketplace Client and Plug-ins for steps.
You can now change IDL Workbench themes, for example, you can switch to a dark theme. For details, see Change the Workbench Theme.
A File > Restart option has been added to the IDL Workbench main menu to enable exiting and restarting the Workbench with a single menu option.
The Editor view can be undocked as well as moved to a separate monitor. See Dock and Undock Views for details.

SOBOLSEQUENCE

The new SOBOLSEQUENCE function generates numbers from the Sobol sequence. A Sobol sequence is a low discrepancy quasi-random sequence. Sobol sequences were designed to fill space in a more uniform manner than completely random sampling. See SOBOLSEQUENCE for details.

Updates

IDL Workbench Internationalization

The IDL Workbench previously included several different languages; with this release, you will need to install new languages from the Babel Language Pack repository available in Eclipse. See Install the Marketplace Client and Plug-ins and Set IDL Workbench Internationalization for details.

Added Keyword to EIGENQL

Added the SYMMETRY_RTOL keyword to EIGENQL, to specify a value that represents the maximum acceptable relative tolerance to be allowed when verifying that the array is symmetric.

Supported Data Types

IDL now supports the following video formats:

Data Type	Read	Write	File to Select
DV (Linux only)	•	•	.dv
RAW	•	•	.raw

IDL can now read MPEG-2 Part 2 files (.mpeg, .mpg, .mp2, .mpg2, .mpeg2, .mpv, .m2v) in addition to writing them. It can also write Matroska video files (.mkv) in addition to reading them.

IDL now supports the following video codec formats:

Name	Description	Read	Write
BMP	Bitmap (Windows only)	•
HEVC	High Efficiency Video Coding	•
VC-1	Microsoft codec, also known as SMPTE 421M	•
VP8	Google codec	•

IDL can now read video files with the RAW codec format in addition to writing them. It can also write video files with the MSMPEG4V1 codec format in addition to reading them.

Library Updates

The 3rd party libraries listed below have been updated to new these versions:

ANTLR, 2.7.5
Apache Commons Logging, 1.1.3
Chromium Embedded Framework, 79.1.35
CLL, 4.1.1
cURL, 7.70.0
DXF, 2.003
Eclipse CVS Client, 1.4.1200.v20191210-0610
HDF5, 1.10.5
IDL Python Bridge now supports 3.7 and 3.8
JPEG was replaced with JPEG-turbo library 2.0.3
libxml2, 2.9.9
netcdf, 4.7.1
OpenSSL, 1.1.1g
Proj 6.2.0

The following 3rd party libraries have been added in this release:

AdoptOpenJDK 11.0.7
AdoptOpenJDK JRE 11.0.7
ecCodes 2.15.0
Esri Projection Engine and data 10.7.0
GCTP2 2
jaxb-api 2.3.1
Mesa Open GL Utility 9.0.1
MGRS 1.3.4
NumPy 1.18.1
Openmp 9.0.1
TBB 2020.2
TinyXML2 8.0.0
wglext.h 23

The following 3rd party libraries have been removed in this release:

Anaconda
Apache HTTP Client
CBLAS
Apache Commons Validator
F2CMath
GEOS
Google GSON
GRIB API
Java 32-bit
libiconv
MODTRAN
ogr2ogr
SpatialLite
Zulu

Product	IDL

Version	9.0