There’s a truckload of news from the Arduino Tooling Team today: Arduino CLI 0.19.0 is now available! This release has tons of great enhancements, exciting new features and heaps of bug fixes. Some things required quite a bit of breaking changes but they’re worth the hassle.

The highlights of this release are certainly the addition of pluggable discovery and the internal restructuring of the startup steps of the Arduino CLI. These affected the JSON output of some commands and the gRPC interface functions, which is documented in the upgrading guide.

We’re really excited about the release of the pluggable discovery. This new feature will give platform developers the possibility to support more and more boards (such as the Teensy), and also new ways of uploading to boards, like via WiFi, Bluetooth®, SSH, CAN bus and anything that comes to mind! If you’re a platform developer and want to know how to start supporting pluggable discovery take a look at the updated platform specification documentation.

The internal restructuring is also no small thing, it makes the Arduino CLI much more resilient to errors. For example, if the user added an invalid or unreachable package index URL, Arduino CLI would previously be completely unusable. After this change, a warning is shown to notify the user of that failure and other functionality of Arduino CLI is unaffected. And last but not least this change greatly improves other tools as well, in some tests we managed to slice in half the startup time of the Arduino IDE 2.0!

There are some breaking changes that only affect those that use the Arduino CLI code as a Go library. These were the result of improvements to the internal structures that store information about Sketches, and to the support for different languages. 

As always, all breaking changes are documented in the upgrading guide. You will find the complete changelog here!