This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
All packages are by default byte-compiled on installation. This makes the installed packages larger (usually marginally so) and may affect the format of messages and tracebacks (which often exclude ‘.Call’ and similar).
New, partly experimental ‘packageDate()’ which tries to get a valid ‘"Date"’ object from a package ‘DESCRIPTION’ file, thanks to suggestions in PR#17324.
‘as.environment(list())’ now works, and ‘as.list()’ of such an environment is now the same as ‘list()’. (PR#15926)