Julia gets mentioned in an article about FORTRAN

Except one.

Being able to produce small (or not that small) stand-alone executables. IMO this is a major feature that non-interactive language users have troubles to comprehend.

I wish I could upvote this twice. In my opinion this is a major disadvantage of Julia compared to other compiled languages.

For example, consider the Pixhawk hardware which is one of the most ubiquitous platforms to build autonomous planes, cars, boats, etc. on. It has at most 2 MB of flash memory. By some accounts a simple “Hello World” binary made using PackageCompiler.jl can be in excess of 100 MB. Perhaps this size can be reduced, but I’ve never seen any documentation or methodology on how to do so.

I think Julia is one of the most elegant and powerful languages available today. What’s been done with Julia in packages such as the SciML framework is astounding. But unless Julia gains the ability to compile compact standalone binaries, there will always be the need in domains such as robotics and autonomy to also use a second compiled language for final implementation.

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