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by ur-whale 1665 days ago
> I'm not sure what advantage Julia

While I'm really not a fan of 1-based indexing, Julia's multiple dispatch is not something easy to match in Python.

[EDIT]: one thing that's still not solved in Julia is code startup time.

Many people will sell you some sort of workflow that works around the problem, but it's the same old tired arguments people would use to defend traditional compiled languages, and I'm not buying.

I really wish they would find a way to truly solve this.

2 comments

I would say the almost every version of Julia 1.x has better in terms of code startup.

as in 1.7 > 1.6 > 1.5 > 1.4 > 1.3 > etc...

it's especially goten way better since julia 1.5, so really mostly in the last few years.

In julia 1.8, what's interesting to me is that the julia runtime will be separated from the llvm codegen; https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/41936

the immediate effect is to allow small static binaries without a huge runtime (namely the LLVM ORC), but the side effect is probably that the interpreter will also get better in cases where you don't want JIT.

> [EDIT]: one thing that's still not solved in Julia is code startup time.

> Many people will sell you some sort of workflow that works around the problem, but it's the same old tired arguments people would use to defend traditional compiled languages, and I'm not buying.

I mean, Julia has a REPL so you can basically edit code as the process runs, which definitely makes startup time less of an issue. The fact Julia can produce such fast code is also pretty nice.

Starting a new process every time you want to run a snippet of code isn't getting the best out of a dynamic language...