Releasing at JuliaCon was always the communicated goal, though admittedly with a bit of a hedge that we may not manage to get it done. As for the 1.0RC business, 0.7 and 1.0 are the same release except that 0.7 includes additional depreciation earnings that are not in 1.0. This decision was made to keep with our communicated policy of having at least one versions where deprecations would produce a warning. There were a number of 0.7 release candidates in the months leading up to the release. Since the changes in 1.0 were minimal over 0.7, it didn't need extensive validation and the one day was enough to make sure it worked. Would a bit more time have been better? Sure, but in retrospect it was totally fine. 1.0 was a fairly solid release and has gotten more solid with the LTS patch releases that many people still use. The big problem was packages in the ecosystem needing 2-3 months to catch up, but I'm not sure that could have been avoided. One of the learnings we have is that most people won't upgrade their software until the new version is released and upgrading is absolutely necessary.