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by ChrisRackauckas 907 days ago
The load time improvements are amazing. Thanks to everyone that was involved. I've been using it locally for months now simply because of this feature and I had to update my "how to deal with compile-time" blog post (https://sciml.ai/news/2022/09/21/compile_time/) to basically say system images really aren't needed anymore with these improvements. With that and the improvements to parallel compilation I tend to not care about "first time to X" anymore. To me it's solved and I'm onto other things (though I personally need to decrease the precompilation time of DifferentialEquations.jl, but all of the tools exist in v1.10 and that's on me to do, ya'll have done your part!).

Additionally:

* Parser error messages are clearer

* Stack traces are no longer infinitely long! They are good and legible!

* VS Code auto-complete stuff is snappier and more predictive (might be unrelated, but is a recent improvement in some VS Code things)

Altogether, I'm pretty happy with how this one shaped up and am looking forward to static compilation and interfaces being the next big focus areas.

4 comments

For historical reasons I'm typically skeptical of claims that "TTFX" have improved. However, I just tried out Julia 1.10 and it is noticeably quicker than the last version I was using (1.8).

It takes some time to precompile packages, but once that's done I'm seeing the first plot pop up in fractions of a second.

Compliments to the Julia team! I'm looking forward to trying out this new version.

I think v1.9 is where most of the magic happened there — packages gained the ability to list out their precompilation work during installation, which reduced compilation (and associated invalidations) at runtime.
1.10 had some substantial `using` time improvements (roughly 2-3x) from just hunting down lots of the slow parts in the compiler and fixing them.
Just wanted to say I appreciate all the Julia content and evangelism you put out. It's kept me excited for the language and is a big reason I still use it for most of my personal work.
That is the thing, many things only manage to succeed by having the patience to wait for the outcome from incremental improvements.

Looking forward to update my Julia installation.

For those wondering what Chris is talking about, I just tried this:

    using Plots
    plot(sin)

from fresh start, and it's about 2 seconds on my Dell Latitude 7400 (Core i7).
Julia 1.10 takes 1.00 seconds on my laptop, including loading Julia itself:

time julia -e "using Plots; plot(sin)"