# Best practice: Julia development under Windows?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-julia-development-under-windows/112711>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [April 9, 2024, 8:24am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-julia-development-under-windows/112711 "2024-04-09T08:24:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![nilshg](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/nilshg/32/2283_2.png) [@nilshg](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nilshg)\
**Post date:** [April 9, 2024, 10:21am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-julia-development-under-windows/112711/6 "2024-04-09T10:21:57Z")

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It’s also fair to say I think that lots of people have run into an issue that can break any package which relies on any artifacts which has been around since 1.10 pre-release versions and still isn’t fixed on 1.10.2:

> <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/52272>
>
> This is a somewhat speculative issue without a reproducer - I'm filing this as I…'ve run into this a few times now and have had sporadic interactions with people on Discourse/Slack seeing this as well, so hopefully this consolidates things by giving those who experience this issue something to search for. 
> 
> What prompted me to file today was seeing this in one of my environments:
> 
> \`\`\`
> 64 dependencies successfully precompiled in 360 seconds. 266 already precompiled.
> 1 dependency had output during precompilation:
> ┌ GR
> │ ERROR: LoadError: InitError: could not load library "C:\\Users\\ngudat\\.julia\\artifacts\\52bbefbea6a9098fa5c57208812d3868fac90841\\bin\\libxml2-2.dll"
> │ Access is denied.
> │ Stacktrace:
> │ \[1\] dlopen(s::String, flags::UInt32; throw\_error::Bool)
> │ @ Base.Libc.Libdl .\\libdl.jl:117
> \`\`\`
> 
> I had previously posted on Discourse about this here:
> 
> https://discourse.julialang.org/t/windows-artifact-issue-access-denied-when-installing-plots-makie/103734/4
> 
> with others chiming in reporting the same issue. There's also an issue reported with Yggdrasil here:
> 
> https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil/issues/7625
> 
> All of this is a bit of a throwback to this old issue from 1.5 days:
> 
> https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/38411
> 
> (and again with what I've seen on 1.10 again starting Julia as admin was fine, but then required to always run as admin when wanting to use any packages loading artifacts).
> 
> If anything changed in how artifacts get handled on Windows it might be worth looking into. Equally if no one else chimes in here reporting any issues I might just be seeing a hangover effect from artifacts installed earlier and the problem is solved on rc1 already.

I could also dig up the old XGBoost issue where that was broken on Windows for multiple Julia versions, or the fact that Pluto cell interruptions never worked (I think until very recently?) - these things don’t tend to happen on Linux and Mac, partly because Linux and Mac are nicer development environments I guess, but also because it’s just a fact of life that the Venn diagram intersection between “is a core-ish Julia developer” and “uses Windows” is pretty close to an empty set.

(Just to be clear: I’m using Windows myself at work, which is 90% of my Julia usage, and it’s absolutely fine, specifically the package operations thing isn’t really an issue anymore)

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