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by brabel 45 days ago
> code that is uglier and still much slower than C++.

Oh such a shame indeed! They didn’t even manage to produce better looking code at least?? Julia was looking great in 2019 but it was very buggy still so I stopped looking. Had hopes that by now it would be a good choice over C++ and Rust with similar performance.
1 comments
cmrdporcupine 45 days ago
There's simply no way it'd ever have similar performance to those. It's not possible.

I have always seen it as a potential alternative to Java, and definitely better than Python.

My experience working in it professionally was that it was... fine. But the GC in it was not good under load and not competitive with Java's.

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csvance 45 days ago
From the sound of your post I'm guessing you view Julia as a general purpose language. I'd consider it general purpose insofar as the application leans into fast numerical computing, everyone else secondary. It can do most of the things other languages do reasonably well, but that's not why you would pick Julia for a project over say Java. You pick it because you want to write fast numerical code and express it elegantly. All of the other typical "glue" things you need to ship a product are secondary to that, but good enough to get the job done.

The key to performance with the GC in Julia is not allocating, but it has gotten substantially better since 2019.

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2ndorderthought 45 days ago
How hard was it to maintain a large Julia code base rather then say an OOP or Rust one? It has an interesting paradigm. I feel like it could get really messy
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andyferris 45 days ago
Personally I never struggled. You can employ interfaces and maintain them judiciously.

But interfaces are informal. Not using a monorepo say makes it harder to be sure if your broke downstream or not (via downstream’s unit tests).

But freedom from Rust’s orphan rule etc means you can decompose large code into fragments easily, while getting almost Zig-style specialisation yet the ease of use of python (for consumers). I would say this takes a fair bit of skill to wield safely/in a maintainable fashion though, and many packages (including my own) are not extremely mature.

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cmrdporcupine 45 days ago
I personally think it requires discipline, I saw it go both ways.

I was never an expert in the language, but worked along people who were and they generally made nice code.

But there were a few places where I saw intensely confusing patterns from overloading with multimethods. Code that became hard to follow, and had poor encapsulation.

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