[kxyvr]

At least in the past, there were some issues with the licensing of dependencies. For example, both Julia and MATLAB were dependent on a variety of routines from SuiteSparse such as the Choleski factorization and the QR factorization. These routines are dual licensed commercial/GPL. The difference is that your MATLAB license gave the ability to use things like the MATLAB Compiler to distribute somewhat closed code to a client because they, ostensibly, have a license for SuiteSparse. Julia did not, so any project compiled into a stand alone executable would be subject to GPL unless an additional license for the dependencies was purchased. Now, if you're only distributing the source code, which most people do, this doesn't matter as much, but we should all be aware of our license responsibilities. MATLAB has more functionality built-in and I trust they've done the legal legwork for their included routines, so I don't have to.

To be clear, Julia constantly updates and I'm sure many of its original dependencies are being recoded to help address this issue. I still think it's worth a check and audit if someone wants to put together a broader project as to not get burned by this issue later.

[sundarurfriend]

Yeah, there have been active attempts to move SuiteSparse out of the base sysimage for this reason. It was planned for this 1.9 release, but looks like there are some performance regressions from the current attempts, so it's not yet there.

Julia code is mostly distributed as source code, and compiling into standalone executables and then distributing them to outsiders is not very common, so it doesn't often come up as an issue. But it's an important detail to keep in mind in case the use case does arise.

[kxyvr]

I appreciate the work on this. That's not particularly easy code to write, so thanks to whoever is working through this.