That's not true though. It's everytime I want to do anything with Julia, I need to wait upto a minute or two. Gadfly takes ages to pre-compile.

Closed your terminal session? You're outta luck. Wait 2 mins please. Launch a notebook and want to start working on something? Wait 40 seconds. Wanna check something quick in Julia REPL session? Wait 7 seconds. Let me run this Julia script, wait 55 seconds.

I feel like the entire community should stop doing what they're doing and fix this issue. I am afraid, it is difficult to fix otherwise it would have been fixed by now.

This is also roughly my experience (though I haven’t tried 1.6 yet) and it really a shame - I much prefer Julia’s syntax to R’s (my primary language) and would love to switch for statistics work.

The problem is perhaps that I largely do fairly simple statistics and plotting, with scripts that in R usually take seconds rather than minutes to run, and the disadvantages of the requirement to compile the code overcomes the compiled speed advantage.

I have the same use case as you describe and it's not unreasonable to conclude that right now Julia simply does not offer anything that R does not. It seems most Julia users are more in fields like numerical computing or scientific simulations and such, where it does offer clear advantages. But if you just want to run some of the statistical tests you learn in undergrad or want to explore some data R is just a better choice right now.

You can speed this up using a custom system image, but the usability of it kinda sucks.

https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/dev/examples/...

Then they should have the package manager do it. Or the package maintainer.

The current release candidate for 1.6 does exactly that. In parallel.

Sweet!