[ChrisFoster]

> it makes a mess of your system that is hard to clean up

This was true in the past, but the Julia ecosystem has rapidly moved away from installing anything via system package managers or messing with the system state in hard to understand ways.

Instead, everything goes into the .julia directory under the control of the Julia package manager, and the dependencies for any given project can be reproduced on another machine or OS by copying the Project and Manifest. The same goes for binary dependencies (eg, the result of compiling C/fortran/rust/go code) for which there's some amazing cross compilation tooling and build infrastructure — see https://binarybuilder.org/

At this point, I think Julia projects enjoy really first class portability and reproducibility.

[dan-robertson]

Yeah I agree. Comparing Julia to the mess that is eg python environments, this seems loads better. And I think it’s a reasonable state for something where your deps might not be in the language. Maybe specifying things in a more nix-like way would be better but I think it’s pretty good as is and doesn’t pollute your system with random installations