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by jampekka 932 days ago
If this is fixed, I'll probably switch from Python to Julia. As a language Julia is vastly superior to Python. The complaint was dismissed for so long (and is still dismissed e.g. here in HN discussions) I gave up hope it will be fixed, but I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong.

Do standalone binaries here include shared libraries (with a C ABI)? That would be a dream.
2 comments
amj7e 932 days ago
The one you need is this which is already merged but was after the 1.10 feature freeze so it has to wait till 1.11, though you can test it with nightly builds which is available on julialang site: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/51435

Unfortunately, the core devs are not too chatty about standalone binaries, because of how Julia's internals are set there are going to be a lot of unforeseen challenges, so they are not trying to promise how things will be rather let's wait and see how things will turnout. Since packagecompiler.jl already has C ABI and one goal discussed about binaries being easily callable from other languages and vice versa, I would bet that it will have shared libraries.

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jampekka 932 days ago
> The one you need is this which is already merged but was after the 1.10 feature freeze so it has to wait till 1.11, though you can test it with nightly builds which is available on julialang site: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/51435

The discussion seems to be too deep in Julia internals for me to follow. Is this about startup time or defining an entry point (or both?). I haven't had problems with Julia entrypoints (yet at least).

With the nightly `./julia-f7618602d4/bin/julia -e "using DynamicalSystems"` still takes over 5 seconds. Can I somehow define a main to make this faster or precompile more efficiently?

> Since packagecompiler.jl already has C ABI and one goal discussed about binaries being easily callable from other languages and vice versa, I would bet that it will have shared libraries.

Sounds promising. Shared libraries are not a musthave for me, but could allow Julia save us from C++ in more cases.

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amj7e 932 days ago
Thats for an entry point, you can search `Base.@main` to see a little summary of it. Later it will be able to be callable with `juliax` and `juliac` i.e. `~juliax test.jl` in shell.

DynamicalSystems looks like a heavy project. I don't think you can do much more on your own. There have been recent features in 1.10 that lets you just use the portion you need (just a weak dependency), and there is precompiletools.jl but these are on your side.

You can also look into https://github.com/dmolina/DaemonMode.jl for running a Julia process in the background and do your stuff in the shell without startup time until the standalone binaries are there.

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lukego 932 days ago
The half-life of major Julia problems is impressively short.

Compiler latency ("time to first plot") used to be miserable but after a few releases with incremental improvements it feels mostly solved to me.

Just now on Friday at JuliaCon Local in Eindhoven one of the keynotes was about similar ongoing work on stand-alone binaries (including shared libraries to call like C/Fortran.)

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markkitti 929 days ago
You can create a shared library via PackageCompiler.jl today and `@cfunction`. It's just not as modular as it could be.

https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/stable/libs.h...

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amj7e 932 days ago
Uh man, there aren't Eindhoven videos online. What was the tdlr. ?
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