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Comment by ericjang | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else concerned that despite being an open-source project with permissive licensing, the formation of the Julia Computing group has made Julia's development a bit of a walled garden? I don't mean this in the sense that Apple or Matlab are "walled gardens", but the for-profit company, of which many core developers are founders/employees, develops a number of tools and services that are not open-source AFAIK.

I believe the group also implicitly controls what packages are allowed/disallowed from the packages list. At the same time, I also recognize the need to support the core developers and the business model makes a lot of sense. Thoughts?

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"the formation of the Julia Computing group has made Julia's development a bit of a walled garden".

I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can see, Julia Computing is not rich enough to take over development of the language, even if that is what they wanted to do. It's just a way for those guys to get paid for their full-time commitment to Julia, and a fairly standard one, as far as I can see. Language developers that aren't funded by a large existing company tend to do consultancy to pay the bills.

Not concerned at all. It's great. It's a modern, fresh, honest approach.

The only concern would be if an ad company like Google or Facebook would buy them. Hope this never happens and they stay independent (but very successful and rich and everything)

Second that.

I am not sure what prompts the statement about Julia Computing implicitly controlling what packages are allowed/disallowed. Pretty much everything is allowed so long as it conforms to minimum published requirements.

The process is carried out completely in the open on github in the METADATA.jl repository. Such statements can be very damaging to the community, when made without solid proof.

Is our package management as good as it can be. No - and we are working on Pkg3. Is the process sometimes tedious - Yes, it sometimes is. But is it controlled by some group at Julia Computing - Definitely not.

There was a long thread about Julia / Julia Computing here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/1zIlXQYb... . Viral said in the first post that "We will respond [to questions] back with a detailed blog post." They answered a subset of concerns on the list, but to my knowledge such a blog post does not exist.

Other than issues I mentioned in that thread, my main ongoing concern is that it is unclear where the boundary between Julia the community project (which includes their non-profit fiscal sponsorship via Numfocus) and Julia Computing, the company. Who owns the Julia trademark? Who owns the julialang.org domain? Who, ultimately, controls the direction of the project?

Ultimately, I want Julia to last for a long time, and for it to remain free software. I get the impression that all the founders want the same thing, which is encouraging. But even more encouraging would be to see the community's governance structured in a way that enforces this.

I really wish they had implemented Julia in C++11, instead of C. The source code seems to be very difficult to comprehend for anyone who is not one of the original developers. [1]

[1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/src/julia.h

Julia is mostly (> 65 %) written in Julia. There's some C (20 %, bootstrap etc.), some C++ (8 % llvm interface), some scheme (4 %, parser). I think it's one of the main points, that Julia should be strong enough that such things _can_ be written in itself.

Go was initially written in C. I think many consider C++ to be unnecessarily complicated and avoid it at the lowest level.

Btw.: Do you know the developer documentation? Just in case: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/#Developer-Documentation...

Programming language runtimes tend to be somewhat complex (real world ones, at least). The implementation of the internals of a modern LLVM-based JIT language is bound to be somewhat "esoteric" regardless of what it's written in – using C++11 wouldn't change that. The developer docs are pretty comprehensive these days and a significant number of people have "picked it up" and become serious contributors to Julia's internals. In fact, of the people who hack on internals the most these days, none are original developers. (I'm thinking of Jameson, Yichao and Keno for those who are familiar with Julia's development.)

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