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by NeuroCoder 1135 days ago
I didn't even know some of these things were being worked on until recently. I totally understand why devs don't treat development like a Twitter feed, posting every thought that pops into their head instead of working. However, it would be really interesting to follow some of these developments without having to deep lurk all the PRs.

Sorry, pretty shallow complaint. Great work!

5 comments

A lot of things are shared on a daily basis. There's a lot of open discussion on the various community channels like Discourse and Slack: the #ttfx channel on slack for example is a great one to follow to keep up with the latency changes and report wins and losses of different changes. There's a lot of random package devs testing each PR to show how the different changes are effecting their package. One that comes to mind is the Trixi.jl folks which are sharing the result of almost every update with a bunch of plots to track the latency changes. See https://julialang.org/community/ for a full list of community channels.

Things of course only show up in the HN front page when they reach a sexy conclusion, which also means that what shows up on HN is a very biased subset of the discussion which omits most subtlety and posts the biggest speedup numbers. Most of the day-to-day of course is things more 10% changes in some case, where only when compounded 100 times you finally have a story the general HN public cares to hear. This also generally means that the long discussions of caveats and edge cases is also filtered from what most of the public tends to generally read (it's just difficult to capture some things in a blog post in any concise way), so if you care for the nuance I highly recommend joining some of the Slack channels.

The NEWS.md is created pretty early on in the process, so you can track that to see "fresh off the oven" changes. For eg. here's the one for Julia 1.10 (goes without saying that it's incomplete, subject to change, etc.): https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/NEWS.md
For developments in latency specifically, check out my blog post: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/latency/

I know this doesn't inform you about dev work on Julia in general, but it goes into detail with the recent improvements to latency

I have been a fly on the wall in the ttfx channel on their slack. And there are a few other channels about julia internals. I do not have anything to contribute there, but it is fascinating to learn various julia internal details from listening in on these threads.
Most of these features were covered at last year’s JuliaCon. Videos are all online - worth checking out!