EOSIO 1.3.0 Release - What changed?

Hi folks,

For the EOS investors and developers, the Block.one team just released the EOSIO Version 1.3.0 in 18th September including many changes in velocity, accessibility and security.

But, I see that one of the greatest improvements that occurred in this release was the launch of a more extensible documentation about the project for developers, decreasing the learning curve and indirectly increasing the adoption by the development community.

Also, a stable toolkit for generating smart contracts was launched with its documentation and some smart contract programming examples.

Some of the major changes included in this release include:

• New WebAssembly Interpreter WABT:
  Internal profiling indicated that it was up to 2x faster at retiring contract transactions compared to our current default interpreter: binaryen. This release includes a complete integration of WABT into the EOSIO blockchain allowing nodes to take advantage of the decreased cost of transaction processing. This can be enabled by setting the wasm-runtime configuration for nodeos to wabt.

• Trusted Producer: Light Validation
  In order to facilitate faster propagation of transactions and blocks within the local network of API, P2P and block-signing nodes operated by a given block producer, the option to grant light-validation to blocks created by that producer's block-signing node has been added to nodeos.

• MongoDB improvements
  MongoDB now stores the block information and the RAM usage as part of action_trace data allowing greater insight into how actions utilize resources.
  Additionally, the ability to filter actions based on wildcards in any combination of the receiver, contract, action filters allows for greater flexibility when tracking a subset of the actions on a given chain.

• HTTP over Unix Socket support for keosd
  keosd now supports HTTP-RPC requests delivered over a Unix socket. This allows operators to take advantage of greater security and permissions concepts available to named sockets.

• Unknown configuration items in config.ini will now error on startup
  Prior to 1.3.0 unknown configuration items in config.ini would be silently ignored. This behavior has been changed in 1.3.0 to an error that prevents startup of nodeos.

If you are interested about reading in details about the changes mentioned above and some minor changes you can find more details in this medium post and on the github's project repository.

If you are a developer check the new documentation here.