JAGS 5.0.0 has been released after an extended beta period. Source tarballs and Windows installers are available on SourceForge, with macOS installer coming soon. Key changes include better multi-core support on macOS, a new elliptical slice sampler contributed by Marcel Jonker, bug fixes for the MNormal sampler and BaseRNGFactory reproducibility, and a workaround for a dic.samples logic error. Notably, the current rjags package on CRAN (version 4-17) is incompatible with JAGS 5.0.0; users must install rjags version 5-x from SourceForge. The CRAN upload is delayed to allow reverse dependency maintainers time to update their packages. A series of blog posts covering new features like reproducibility, multicore support, ABI compatibility, and new diagnostics is planned.
