Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BrandonS113 1237 days ago
Yes I follow this. The load time keeps getting better. And am looking forward to 1.9.

I really don't want to come across as negative, Julia is a fantastic language, and my hope is that that it will continue its impressive improvement path.

But to follow form the thread's sentiment, I have the feeling Julia lives in an unstable equilibrium. It is lower level than R/Python but doesn't quite deliver the benefits of rust/c/fortran/c++. I find my colleagues gravitate to one of the 2 equilibria.

Maybe your last paragraph crystallizes it. If one lives in the REPL, Julia is wonderful. Not how I work. I prefer the command line. Have new data, run code on it. Data changes in real time, code not. My code may run millions of times on different operating systems and only infrequently change.
2 comments
markkitti 1237 days ago
We already have some forward prototypes of being able to run Julia ahead-of-time compiled native code from the command line.

https://github.com/brenhinkeller/StaticTools.jl

I think what we'll end up with is a language that can be used in both a fully static mode and in a dynamic mode along with some possible mixing. We may yet get the benefits of a statically compiled language as the tooling continues to develop. I do not see anything inherent in the language that would prevent that from happening.

link
DNF2 1237 days ago
In Julia you can go low-level, but there is no requirement. You can write purely high-level, generic, untyped code, with good performance. So I'm a bit reluctant to accept the claim that it's lower level.

What are the things where low-level code is required in Julia, but not in Python/R?

link