Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by affinepplan 500 days ago
> Julia didn’t actually have any proper PLT or compilers people involved in the outset.

while I don't disagree that currently JAX outshines Julia's autodiff options in many ways, I think comments like this are 1. false 2. rude and 3. unnecessary to make your point
1 comments
catgary 500 days ago
Julia was a scientific computing language made by scientific computing experts. They did a great job on some things, but whiffed a few major decisions early on.
link
affinepplan 500 days ago
It's a general purpose language made by experts in a myriad of subjects.
link
catgary 500 days ago
I’m sorry, but I’m going to disagree with you on that. Can you point to any of the language designers who had a background in programming language theory? The closest thing I see is Bezanson’s work on technical computing, which seems laser-focused on array programming. I don’t really see anything related to types or program transformations.
link
nsajko 500 days ago
> whiffed a few major decisions early on

Anything particular in mind?

link
patrick451 499 days ago
The always on jit was a big mistep (IMO, the opt-in torchscript model is much better). I tried a julia a few times and it was just too slow to be usable for anything remotely exploratory. Every year or so, I'd read "TTFP has been improved", so I'd try again and it was still slow as mollasas in siberia. I suspect a lot of people had that experience and will be hard pressed to give julia a real shot at this point, even it it does/has fix the problem.
link
catgary 499 days ago
In general, I’d say there’s too much superficial flexibility but not enough control.

- I wrote this elsewhere: I find their approach to memory management/mutable arrays really hits the worst of both worlds (manual memory management and garbage collection). You end up trying to preallocate memory but don’t actually have control over memory allocations. I find the dynamic type system exacerbates this.

- It’s a very big language, even in the IR. So proper program transforms like mapping functions or autograd are quite difficult to implement.

- Static compilation is really hard, which makes it a non-starter for a lot of domains where it could have made inroads (robotics, games, etc).

link
xgdgsc 499 days ago
Static compilation is already available in a commercial product: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/syslabcc-suzhou-tongyuans-... . https://github.com/Suzhou-Tongyuan/syslab-deploy .

EDIT: or 2 products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42962548

link