[adgjlsfhk1]

it's not. once you generate it somewhere you can just copy the files to anywhere that has the same architecture.

sysimages are huge (but they've gotten a decent bit smaller recently). notably, 1.8 added some features that let you make them a bunch smaller for deployment. you can now remove the metadata (i.e source code text) which saves about 20%, and you can also generate it from a Julia launched with -g0 to remove debug info (Julia unlike C includes debug info by default because stack traces are nice). we also recently fixed a really dumb bug that was causing libraries to be duplicated in sysimages, so that will sometimes save a few dozen mb. (who knew that tar duplicates symlinks?)

When did you last check? it's now pretty dejankified and has been for about a year. the docs aren't perfect, but I think they're relatively good.

[cookieperson]

People have been saying "it's better" for 3 years now. One things for sure, I'm not going to go recheck this again, anytime soon. Anything I'll say at this point will be met with "it's better now" and then I'll have to go find out it's really not in classic Julia fashion. The docs for package compiler were awful for about 2 years. See my above comment and other users jumping as to how annoying it is.

Fun Julia story. I remember one time someone, I believe from Julia computing(iirc) was telling me how much better Julia had gotten at something. They sent me links to academic flag plant repositories that had no code in them. Literally empty packages with no branches even with statement of purposes readmes. I offered to work on it and was met with... Academic competition about how I shouldn't do that because a package already existed for it, and how I should try to work with the author on theirs. Meanwhile I already had code for it, it just never went into the ecosystem. I'm highly unlikely to start investigating Julia again in the short term. Maybe in five years.

[adgjlsfhk1]

The reason people have been saying it's gettting better for 3 years is because it has been. PackageCompiler 1.0 was released in 2020 which made it possible to distribute Julia programs as self contained apps, Julia 1.6 released in 2021 added parallel precompilation which made loading a lot faster. Julia 1.8 was released in 2022 which improved precompilation a bunch, and Julia 1.9 will be released in 1 to 2 weeks and makes precompilation cache native code which significantly improves things again.

Deployment is a fundamentally hard problem for dynamically typed languages. Shipping a Julia .so will probably never be as easy as shipping a .jar file in java. However, Julia has gotten a lot more deployable over the past 3 or so years and work on that front continues. Julia 1.10 already has a bunch of compiler speedups that make things a bunch faster than 1.9 (I expect 1.10 to ship late 2023 or early 2024)

[nojonestownpls]

Your parent comment wrote "it's better", you said "it's getting better". This is a common Motte-and-bailey argument in Julia discussions:

The "it's better [now]" is most often given as a response to someone expressing a problem they've had, and in context it's presented in a way that suggests the problem is fixed.

"It's getting better" is a far more reasonable response, if it also comes with a caveat about how much better it's gotten and how usable for purpose it is. A lot of the time Julians seem to conflate between "it's a reliable usable feature" and "a pull request vaguely related has been merged and will be available some time in the future, which fixes maybe 10% of the issue".

[adgjlsfhk1]

apologies if I caused confusion. (personally, I'm not sure where "pretty dejankified" falls on the getting better to better spectrum)

[cookieperson]

If you reread this comment thread under the guise of "hm how is the Julia community?". I think you'd find it very enlightening. Maybe even find things you could improve. If only that was the goal.