A graphical Julia installer for Windows

General Usage
19

First, disclaimer - my opinion, just as (almost) every opinion here, is just that - a private opinion, not representing that semi-mythical community.

@uwestoehr, it looks like you are starting 4½ quite large projects at once:

  1. Learning Julia, it’s ecosystem and tools (Terminal, CLI tools, git, GitHub, packages etc.).
  2. Creating your specific application as a part of a commercial product.
  3. Establishing a workflow to integrate Lazarus GUI with Julia in a compiled executable or library.
  4. Creating a GUI installer for Windows from the scratch.
  • And teaching the Julia community (whatever it is) how to organize the development processes.

It’s quite a lot, and in open source biting too much to swallow would regularly result in wasted effort and abandoned projects.

Now, let me tell what I think of your nos. 3 and 4.

Having an established way to integrate a Julia backend with some GUI in a shippable package is what is your actual need (in no.2), and it may find a lot of similar applications.

But as concerning a graphical installer for Windows - I mostly agree with the said in the post above:

I’d only add one more pre-requisite which is the knowledge of English language (as you mentioned translations).

I do not think there is a real need in one more installer. juliaup does it’s job. Unfortunately, MS Store is not accessible to everyone, and the juliaup MSIX App Installer has been reported to have some issues. Still I assume getting that installer to work should be much easier than to write a Julia version manager from the scratch.

Furthermore, should you even get your installer working, it will be not an easy thing to get it accepted. Though one can easily experiment with one or another Julia package, I’d definitely be reluctant to experiment with a Julia installer. I have juliaup on all my computers, and I’m not going to risk an alternative installer messing up my system. Futhermore, juliaup usage is the same on all OSes, whereas you probably lack resources and experience to get it work on macOS and Linux.

Probably you could help the juliaup people to find out what is wrong with their installer? That would be great!