I’m exploring different technologies for building a scalable messaging application and was wondering whether Julia is a practical choice for the backend.
Some questions I have are:
Has anyone built a real-time messaging system using Julia?
Which frameworks or libraries work well for WebSockets or asynchronous communication?
How does Julia compare with Go, Elixir, or Node.js for handling thousands of concurrent users?
Are there any open-source messaging app examples written in Julia?
I’d love to hear about your experiences, recommendations, or any production use cases.
In terms of raw performance, Julia probably stands out from the ones you listed. But if you want to have a truly scalable architecture you must think about threading, clustering, caches and databases more so than an individual language. If I were you I’d compare Java, Julia and Rust with probably a PostgreSQL database. Depending on what you build, it could also drift in the realms of Kafka/RabbitMQ.
Of the languages you listed, Go is generally considered the strongest for backend development, to include best-in-class concurrency built in from the bottom up. Excellent availability of libraries for this sort of thing, and no-nonsense cross-compilation to single binaries for deployment. Agent-friendly; I recently “vibe-coded” a small backend service to sit behind a Julia project with a locally-hosted LLM with Go; worked the first time.