Julia devs have done a good job in the past of pushing LLVM patches upstream, but it would be wonderful if sometime in the next few releases, Julia could depend on an unpatched LLVM.
Sure, that would be great. Let’s hope the next LLVM version doesn’t have any bugs. Seriously, though, Julia uses the LLVM toolchain much harder than most projects. And it’s this intense level of compiler tech that make Julia so fast and capable. I don’t anticipate Julia being able to use a vanilla LLVM version until we stop pushing so hard on compiler tech, which I don’t really see happening anytime soon. Most of the projects in the compiler work thread (that everyone is so excited about) are likely to uncover LLVM bugs that will require patches until proper fixes can be upstreamed. By comparison, the languages you’re comparing Julia are extremely conservative with the language tech they use. Guido van Rossum has repeatedly rejected proposals to add “fancy language techniques” to CPython, even if they provided significant speedups.
Along that note, the package manager and packaging ecosystem isn’t currently very friendly to system Julia installations. My
~/.juliafolder is currently 2.8 GiB.
You must have a lot of stuff installed! Mine is only 60 MB. Have you tried doing pkg> gc? That will clean up any package versions that are no longer referenced by any manifest file.
As far as I know there’s no good way currently to provide system installation of common packages that can be shared between users.
There absolutely is. Your default DEPOT_PATH will include something like /usr/share/julia and /usr/local/share/julia. These are where shared installations should go. Any packages installed there with the right permissions will be usable by any user with those depots in their depot path.
Because Julia doesn’t come packaged on most distributions, any software written in Julia must be distributed alongside the Julia runtime. PackageCompiler is great for this if you can get it to work with your software, but it still needs polish, and the binaries it produces are still rather heavy. Other solutions involving bringing along a whole Julia installation are of course even more heavyweight, and then you’re also stuck with the often very large pause of compilation time at invocation.
This is all quite true. The way forward is to improve PackageCompiler and being able to generate leaner standalone binaries for Julia programs. Of course, that will probably require carrying a bunch of LLVM patches around 