[cbkeller]

Yeah, Julia has had some form of precompilation/caching for ages now, but sorting out all invalidations appears to be highly nontrivial [1] and devs have had more fundamental priorities pre-1.0. There have been some substantial improvements to latency in the meanwhile nonetheless, and PackageCompiler.jl is a viable option as well.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/www.julialang.org/pull/794

[BubRoss]

Just saying caching is difficult doesn't gel with my experience of what seems like low hanging fruit. I realize a lot of Julia ends up being templates, but when just one line of importing the same plotting package always takes 30 seconds or so, I get suspicious of the idea that all the usability warts are super difficult to solve.

This has always been a huge complaint for Julia and it seems like one of those things that happens to new languages. People are excited, there are a few big rough edges that drive people away, they get ignored or underprioritized for WAY too long, and a giant window of opportunity is missed. I think of D with weeding out garbage collection, go with generics, D with tools and infrastructure, Zig with its refusal to parse carriage returns or tabs, Rust with compilation times, everyone with a lack of an easy road to a GUI, Jai not being released at all...

I think instead of getting lots of areas to a decent stage, languages end up trying to be the best in a single area and placate their hardcore users, when things like C++ succeed by not having huge blindsides and pitfalls, even if it ends up a little rougher in many areas.

[dnautics]

> when things like C++ succeed by not having huge blindsides and pitfalls

what??

[cbkeller]

Sure, just saying it's not that they haven't tried. If you have some specific ideas for low-hanging fruit that you think the Julia devs have missed though, I'm sure they'd welcome a PR!

edit: also, time-to-first-plot is a lot less than 30 seconds for me these days, even without PackageCompiler. (time-to-second-plot is, as usual, instantaneous)