# JAX v0.3.18 — JAX release v0.3.18

- Product: JAX (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/jax)
- Vendor: Google
- Date: 2022-09-26
- Version: v0.3.18
- Original notes: https://github.com/jax-ml/jax/releases/tag/jax-v0.3.18
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/jax/releases/v0.3.18

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Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Ahead-of-time lowering and compilation functionality is now stable and public via jax.stages
- **added** — Introduce jax.Array for isinstance checks and type annotations for array types in JAX
- **changed** — jax.numpy.ndarray is now a simple alias of jax.Array, changing isinstance behavior for jax-internal objects
- **removed** — jax._src is no longer imported into the public jax namespace
- **removed** — jax.soft_pmap has been deleted; use pjit or xmap instead

* [GitHub commits](https://github.com/google/jax/compare/jax-v0.3.17...jax-v0.3.18).
* Changes
  * Ahead-of-time lowering and compilation functionality (tracked in
    {jax-issue}`#7733`) is stable and public. See [the
    overview](https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/aot.html) and the API docs
    for {mod}`jax.stages`.
  * Introduced {class}`jax.Array`, intended to be used for both `isinstance` checks
    and type annotations for array types in JAX. Notice that this included some subtle
    changes to how `isinstance` works for {class}`jax.numpy.ndarray` for jax-internal
    objects, as {class}`jax.numpy.ndarray` is now a simple alias of {class}`jax.Array`.
* Breaking changes
  * `jax._src` is no longer imported into the from the public `jax` namespace.
    This may break users that were using JAX internals.
  * `jax.soft_pmap` has been deleted. Please use `pjit` or `xmap` instead.
    `jax.soft_pmap` is undocumented. If it were documented, a deprecation period
    would have been provided.