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by oscardssmith
1789 days ago
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Is there anything you think that prevents Julia from being general purpose? The main one I run into is that the garbage collector needs work, but fundamentally I don't think there's much that keeps Julia from being good as a general purpose language. |
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Python is a GP pl (not a very good one, IMO, but it is one). For a long time for some distros Linux CLI and even GUI tools were in python. Can you imagine such an ecosystem in Julia? I can't, nor would I want Julia to make the sacrifices it would need to make to fulfill such a role. There are so many things that python is "mediocre, but good enough" at, that Julia is quite frankly terrible at, because of the (good for what it does) choices that Julia made.
I wouldn't write a quick CLI using Julia (versus a long-running or test runner CLI - I have done this professionally [0]). I wouldn't write a web server that is expected to take a load (a personal website is probably fine, though probably still quite painful). I wouldn't write Anything embedded.
[0] Wrote a containerized storage block device performance measurement tool. Julia was useful to generate and track statistical distributions of random reads and writes with very clear and concise code.
I also think Julia's concurrency story is not that great. But I'm biased against every PL since I have spent a ton of time in erlang/elixir-land which currently has the only (high level) concurrency story that makes any sense IMO.
I liked when Julia's concurrency was done per-process (still lives on in Distributed.jl, iirc). I get that this has performance implications, especially around spawning and expensive communications, even with MPI, but I kind of wanted some sort of non-locality of data to be acknowledged, and maybe I would have preferred the new threading concurrency to work with the Distributed.jl abstraction. I think it would have been even more awesome if Julia GPU treated computation against gpu arrays in the same fashion as a distributed job... But as of the last time I used julia (it's been a while) that wasn't the case.