[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.