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by wbhart 3872 days ago
I think it will be interesting to see what happens with WebAsm. If Julia targets this at some point (it is based on LLVM, so there is a chance of this), then I think it will start to look quite attractive for various use cases that it isn't currently cornering.
4 comments
Nrpf 3872 days ago
Makes sense. But regardless, the core language is better than go in almost every way (as far as I know)... and it has python like syntax. I wonder if thats enough.
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wbhart 3872 days ago
I personally think Julia is technologically superior to a number of popular languages, with a voracious appetite for even more smarts. But you are right that this isn't necessarily enough.

Based on what I've seen so far, I think Julia could eventually break into the Tiobe top 20 languages (it's currently in the top 100). On the other hand, I think this is plenty. As a language currently aimed at (admittedly fairly large) niches that would be an outstanding outcome.

It also makes it fun to work with as a language. It's not just more chicken.

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ViralBShah 3872 days ago
This is something that should be possible eventually. All the Fortran dependencies make it difficult, but as you probably already know, Base will see some trimming and some of these dependencies will become packages (perhaps default, but at least not Base).
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KenoFischer 3872 days ago
I was talking to the WebAsm folks at LLVM Dev a couple of weeks ago and the conclusion was that WebAsm does not yet seem ready to be targeted by us (in particular we would like run-time code loading support for the JIT), but may be there in a year or two.
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wbhart 3872 days ago
Yeah I watched one of the recent vids where they presented the latest on WebAsm and I came to the same conclusion. I imagine it is worth looking into and interacting with those guys so that Julia isn't overlooked by them for the time being, and maybe reassess in another year. It was pleasing to see one of the first questions from the audience after that talk was about Julia.
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CyberDildonics 3872 days ago
I think that could be a pretty huge deal too. Right now Javascript is being pushed to have enough speed to run applications from 15 years ago in the browser.

If an environment is able to have native speed, run in the browser and still be accessible to the people doing scripting now, it could have pretty large implications.

Go also fits the bill I suppose, but Julia is a much better designed language.

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