# Julia gets mentioned in an article about FORTRAN

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-gets-mentioned-in-an-article-about-fortran/60605
**Category:** Community
**Created:** [May 5, 2021, 8:52pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-gets-mentioned-in-an-article-about-fortran/60605 "2021-05-05T20:52:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 48

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### Author: ![jbu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a8b319/32.png) [@jbu](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jbu)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2021, 4:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julia-gets-mentioned-in-an-article-about-fortran/60605/48 "2021-05-07T16:09:18Z")

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> 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](https://pixhawk.org/) 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](https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-pixhawk-overview.html). By some accounts a simple “Hello World” binary made using PackageCompiler.jl can be [in excess of 100 MB](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-do-i-build-an-executable-from-my-hello-world-simple-script/48595/3). 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](https://sciml.ai/) 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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