v2.18.0 **Contains threading bug with map_rect**

Note: these are the release notes for the stan-dev/stan repository.
Further changes may arise at the interface level (stan-dev/{rstan,
pystan, cmdstan}) and math library level (stan-dev/math).

v2.18.0 (13 July 2018)

This is our first release with parallelism (threading and MPI)!

New Features

• New functions from Math library:

  • map_rect
  • multi_normal_rng
  • multi_normal_cholesky_rng
  • multi_student_t_rng
  • many vectorized RNGs
    • multi_normal_rng
    • multi_normal_cholesky_rng
    • multi_student_t_rng
    • bernoulli_rng
    • beta_binomial_rng
    • binomial_rng
    • neg_binomial_2_rng
    • neg_binomial_2_log_rng
    • neg_binomial_rng
    • poisson_rng
    • poisson_log_rng
    • uniform_rng
    • von_mises_rng
  • qr_thin_Q
  • qr_thin_R
  • matrix_exp_multiply
  • scale_matrix_exp_multiply
  • integrate_ode_adams
  • log_mix
  • std_normal
  • ordered_logistic_log
  • ordered_probit_log

• Manual now available in HTML (#2558)

• other vectorized RNGs (#2467)

• Easier-to-use algebra_solver

• Changes to effective sample size calculation (#2451)

• Foreach loops (#2438)

• Standalone generated quantities (#2434)

• Allow users to qualify function parameters as data (#2430)

Bug Fixes

• Better error messages (#2508, #2554)
• Fixes the behavior in mcmc_writer so that when there's an exception thrown in the model's generated quantities block, it writes out the parameter values and NaN for any generated quantity (#2571)
• Allow initialization of a Stan program to continue when there's a violation of constraints in transformed parameters (#2570)
• Fixed += #(2482)
• rising_factorial and falling_factorial type checking (#2413)
• have parser check return type of integrate_ode_bdf functional (#2411)
• increase precision in output of ELBO values (#2406)
• ternary op fixes (#2101)