What the 1.0 Release Candidate phase means (and when 1.0 will drop)

Now that the first Redwood 1.0 release candidate has dropped, I’d like to take a moment to spell out what that means and when a final v1.0.0 might be released.

Our goal with version 1.0 is to present you with a truly production-ready, well-tested, fully-integrated web framework that you can use to build your next app or startup without having to spend weeks or months of precious time and attention adding in all the tools you’ll need to do it.

Up until now, we’ve been building quickly and breaking backwards compatibility often. This was essential to iterate on DX and try out all kinds of new and far-fetched ideas. Now that we believe our feature set is 1.0 ready, we turn to a period of testing and refinement. We expect the release candidate phase to take several months and are aiming for February or March for a final 1.0 release (take that with a grain of salt, I was only off by a year on my 1.0 prediction). :joy:

During this release candidate process, we will try VERY HARD not to break backwards compatibility. Our goal is to work through high priority bugs in the issue tracker and perhaps add small bits of functionality as needed to really nail the initial Redwood experience. This means that, in order to get 1.0 out the door, we will be postponing big feature work and merging PRs for new features or breaking changes. I know it’s hard to wait for your favorite proposed feature to go in, but it’s critically important that we ship a 1.0 soon and this is how we get it done. Once we ship 1.0, we will once again be innovating and shipping all kinds of new features, so don’t despair!

Even though we’ve just begun the RC phase, Redwood is already solid. Numerous startups (some VC funded) and many other projects are already being built with Redwood and are deployed to production on both serverless and traditional environments. You should feel confident to get started with your project on a Redwood release candidate version!

If you’d like to help, we would love to hear your feedback on the release candidate. Tell us what worked or didn’t work, where you got lost in the tutorial, what docs were confusing or missing, and anything else that you loved or hated about Redwood. This is how we get better!

It has only been possible to get to this milestone thanks to the tireless work of more than 250 contributors over the last 2 years. You are amazing! We’re all super stoked about being in RC-land, and I can’t wait to ship a rock-solid kick-ass 1.0!

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