To the limited extend that I have insight into industry research labs (IBM, Google, various quantum-computing startups), they don’t seem that fundamentally different from a university research lab environment.
You can certainly write software in Julia that “just works” and that does not expose source code to the user. But especially for a lab worker inside a research lab, I don’t see that they wouldn’t have staff to set up their lab computer with the Julia environment (or whatever else is required) to run the UI that they need to operate the experiment.
I was under the impression that you were more talking about shipping commercial software to lab workers of an outside organization, where smooth deployment is much more of a difficult concern.
It’s not intended as a value judgement, merely as a description of the state of things. I would be more than happy with developments in Julia that make it easier to ship small binaries, or even native GUI applications. But I’m pretty sure it’s not “typical” for what most current Julia users do.
Like I said, I don’t think what you’re asking for is unreasonable, but it’s not something that Julia currently provides a great solution for.