Julia does definitely need some love from devs with a strong understanding of IO performance. That said, for interactive use the compiler has gotten a bunch faster and better at caching results in the past few years. On Julia 1.10 (released about 6 months ago) the time to load Plots.jl and display a plot from scratch is 1.6 seconds on my laptop compared to 7.3 seconds in Julia 1.8 (2022)