In theory that can be solved with the best of both worlds: have the runtime and JIT in the final binary. That way you still get easy deployment with 1 big file and high performance after the JIT warms up, which should be fast.

I think it's just a problem of manpower on the Julia developer side.

I wholeheartedly agree, one could also note how this is Java-esque. My hope is that someone far more well-versed than me in this area will find the time and push for it. On that note, one wonderful thing about Julia is how easy it is to contribute to the core language since it is written in Julia. It really is amazing to see people from so many disciplines come together to push a “language for science as a whole”.