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by tmvphil 495 days ago
As someone working with it day to day, coming from around 18 years of mostly python, I wish I could say my experience has been great. I find myself constantly battling with the JIT and compilation and recompilation and waiting around all the time (sometimes 10 to 15 minutes for some large projects). Widespread macro usage makes stack traces much harder to read. Lack of formal interfaces means a lot of static checking is not practical. Pkg.jl is also not great, version compatibility is kind of tacked on and has odd behavior.

Obviously there are real bright spots too, with speed, multiple dispatch, a relatively flourishing ecosystem, but overall I wouldn't pick it up for something new if given the choice. I'd use Jax or C++ extensions for performance and settle on python for high level, despite its obvious warts.

2 comments

Yeah, Jax with Equinox, jaxtyping, and leaning hard on python’s static typing modules + typeguard lets you pretend that you have a nice little language embedded in python. I swore off Julia a few years ago.
> Pkg.jl is also not great, version compatibility is kind of tacked on and has odd behavior.

Huh? I think Pkg is very good as far as package managers go, exceptionally so. What specifically is your issue with it?