Where is Julia heading? Lack of clarity about priorities, long-term direction and governance

Shipping of a pre-compiled binary blob generated from julia code that is then run on another machine has not really been a core julia idea (since with Julia you always have a compiler available).

However, there are different venues in progress for it:

  • JuliaC for creating programs that will only need the julia runtime but not its compiler
  • Experiments along the line of GitHub - tshort/StaticCompiler.jl: Compiles Julia code to a standalone library (experimental) for creating completely julia independent libraries.
  • PackageCompiler that can bundle things in a sysimage but ships the full julia runtime and compiler to support JIT.
  • Discussions about distributing package images to avoid local package precompilation

The “core” experience of Julia is however julia itself and its packages that you add and work with locally (together with Project + Manifests for reproducing your environment on other machines).

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