Re:Some fun with π in Julia
by pron on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @04:09AM
(#13874561)
I really like the language, and I've recently used Julia in a scientific computing project, but the experience leaves much to be desired (and I'm certain it will be improved).
Startup time isn't the biggest problem, although it is nowhere near "comparable to the JVM". The JVM will start cold, load a Hello World application from a JAR, run it and shut down in 60-80ms. A Julia Hello World app would take at least a second, even when precompiled into a native executable.
The biggest problem, IMO, is packaging and deployment. I used BuildExecutable, which works OK most of the time (although startup times are still slow), but it results in so many shared libraries, with no easy way to cull them. Without BuildExecutable, I couldn't even find documentation on how to deploy a Julia app as a self-contained program (even not precompiled, but in a way that doesn't require Julia to be installed on the user's machine).
Startup time isn't the biggest problem, although it is nowhere near "comparable to the JVM". The JVM will start cold, load a Hello World application from a JAR, run it and shut down in 60-80ms. A Julia Hello World app would take at least a second, even when precompiled into a native executable.
The biggest problem, IMO, is packaging and deployment. I used BuildExecutable, which works OK most of the time (although startup times are still slow), but it results in so many shared libraries, with no easy way to cull them. Without BuildExecutable, I couldn't even find documentation on how to deploy a Julia app as a self-contained program (even not precompiled, but in a way that doesn't require Julia to be installed on the user's machine).