[skybrian]

It seems like the weak spot for using Julia outside of scientific computing is deployment to interesting targets.

For example, with Go you can build a standalone executable in many platforms, and other languages run on interesting targets like browsers or phones, or run on the JVM.

Any news on that front?

[jballanc]

Yes. Module pre-compilation is already possible, and last I heard there is work underway to use the same sort of mechanism to allow for single-executable compilation. The problem, of course, is that Julia and Go are very different beasts, and pre-compilation will almost certainly limit some of the currently available dynamism. (Already there are packages that cannot be pre-compiled due to these limitations.)

Of course, in this regard Julia is not any different than Python, Ruby, JS, PHP, etc. Also, it's worth noting that Julia has cluster-computing as a concept baked into the language. So, whereas you might need to worry about distributing Go executables to multiple machines in a cluster, with Julia you need only have the Julia runtime installed, and from there any Julia program can distribute itself to any available nodes without further action required.