Originally published on Reddit, got advised to post it here as well. TL;DR Great community. Excellent at expressing “math”. Very fast language. Almost great REPL. Immature ecosystem. Inconvenient debugging. Bad code organization. Background Recently I finished a decently sized Julia project (~3100…

Thank you for posting this! it is a very interesting view of project development that don’t get posted very often. One thing I was curious about was the details of the AI development and I didn’t see that mentioned (unless I missed it). Did you do your own AI models from scratch? Or did you use a p…

[image] rongcuid: Packages are very hard to refactor, due to the UUID system. Even in Rust I don’t like to split packages, because more packages means publishing them is more trouble. Indeed, that’s why I’m thinking about some sort of pseudo-package, which leverages the resolving abilities of…

[image] rongcuid: Doesn’t activating the project remove all those packages from scope? No. The good side of this is that you can use the shared environment packages as you want. The downside is that sometimes you can end up using the package without adding it to your project, when you actuall…

[image] rongcuid: They are so prevalent that there are only a few packages that I would say are not half-dead and are adequately documented: rongcuid, thank you for the writeup. I’d agree with you on many points, especially on the problem of zombie packages, whereas I may disagree on many oth…

If by Makie kwargs you mean the problem that plotting functions swallow incorrect keywords, that is thankfully going to be improved in the upcoming version. I agree that that’s always been a huge footgun.

I want Pkg.jl to manage both dev-time dependency and package dependency. That is, something like this, hypothetically: ] add-dev BenchmarkTools # <- This gets added to the "global" environment ] add DataFrames # <- This gets added to the package dependencies No set up can do this, currently.

It can with two additional lines: ] activate ] add BenchmarkTools ] activate . ] add DataFrames

I originally inteded to do ReinforcementLearning. However, learning RL along with the package and 10 other package at the same time turned out to be too difficult, as I am not an AI major. When I say AI, I mean… literally, Artificial Intelligence (ignore the Chinese comments): @kwdef mutable struc…

Maybe it will work. Not sure if it works for VSCode REPL.

I haven’t used SciML before, so I can’t comment on it. I need to check it out. I have used DifferentialEquations.jl and Optim.jl for my previous projects. They were good, but not relevant for this project.

Experience report after finishing a (reasonably substantial) Julia project in 2024

Community

Topic		Replies	Views
Reflections on Developer Experience After Building a Large Julia Codebase General Usage	33	3289	January 11, 2026
What don't you like about Julia for "serious work"? Community	176	26850	April 20, 2024
I find it hard to develop in Julia Internals & Design	71	6113	February 13, 2026
Will Julia ever fix its "using ..." latency problems? Performance	68	8216	April 25, 2022
Advice on structuring larger codebases General Usage code-organization	19	2187	March 19, 2020

Experience report after finishing a (reasonably substantial) Julia project in 2024

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