When I try to debug code containing a line like CSV.read(full_path, DataFrame) where the spreadsheet has 50k rows and 700 columns the Julia debugger inside VSCode for all purpose stops. I never had the patience to wait until it would finish. The R and Python debuggers handle this file in a couple of minutes. The R function fread() reads files much faster than CSV.read(), by a large margin. So I do not think it is an issue of compiled vs interpreter. R and Python are interpreted but call functions written in C and these functions can be very fast.