Julia is awesome to use, absolutely. But as an application developer, Julia can be frustrating. I wanted to write a post to outline my view on this. I write this post in a subjective tone because I want to share how I feel, because I think that might be useful to the community. My hope is to make my…

For the allocations I currently changed to use Chairmarks.@b, which is fast and, I guess, reliable. Can this part of the discussion be split into a different topic? I think it is a common issue in 1.12 but does not exactly has to do with the original discussion, as this breaks a test, not really th…

I agree with you that its off-topic and the allocations issue better be discussed somewhere else. I just used it as an example to show that relying on internals is standard practice even within Julia official docs and the focus is on the documentation, not the allocations issue. Your example with C…

[image] TimG: This simply isn’t possible unless I access StyledStrings internal. So I have a simple choice. Either I don’t provide the functionality at all, or I need to set myself up for breaking changes in future which are “my fault”. A third option, as @giordano brought up for his package,…

The functions I need already exist in the case of StyledStrings and were suggested for my use by the package author. But they aren’t part of the public API at the moment - though that may, of course, change in future.

[image] jakobnissen: Where Python is explicit about its “consenting adults” principle, perhaps Julia should have been like Java or Rust - no public, no usage? I think this can be handled in a softer way by tooling, eg we already have the excellent ExplicitImports.jl, and once …

[image] fonsp: In short, I find Julia an unstable and difficult platform to develop for. Precompilation is slow, developer tooling is lacking, and with every Julia release, I fear that my packages will stop working (they often do). I would like to bring back the initial concerns raised by the…

[image] juliohm: incomplete tooling Can you, or the OP, please explain what specific tooling you are missing? It would help focus the discussion.

[image] juliohm: incomplete tooling JETLS.jl is already a big step forward, even though it is still a work-in-progress. And Flexible Julia might become an alternative for professional developers, because development is very fast, and bug reports and feature requests are often addressed withi…

Why is precompilation time a problem? LangArena - Programming Languages Benchmark Comparison When you think of the overall workflow, precompilation time feels just as safe and sound as Rust and Cpp compile time. And the Revise experience is much better.

I find it hard to develop in Julia

Internals & Design

stevengj February 10, 2026, 1:03pm 62

Setting a topic timer — we prefer focused threads on specific topics, and this thread is just turning into a grab bag (documented vs undocumented APIs, allocation tracking, REPL tab completion, TTFX, debugging tools, … ?).

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I find it hard to develop in Julia

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