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Comment by bob457 | Hacker News Reader

The article may be old, but as if 6 months ago (the last time I tried Julia), the complaints about the jit were still valid. Typing something into the repl with a syntax error took tens of seconds to produce an error. Creating an array with 3 elements took over a second. Plotting took forever. It was a very frustrating experience.

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As one of the Julia developers; this is quite atypical. We’d like to get a bug report on our GitHub tracker from you if you’re willing to open one. Anecdotally, on my 2018 MacBook Pro, full startup of Julia, compilation and execution of a syntax error, and cleaning everything up, takes about 0.8s. (Measured with “time julia -e ‘foo foo foo’”). That’s not a time to brag about, but it’s an order of magnitude faster than your comment. Your system may be slower about certain things, but tens of seconds is way far out of the distribution of reasonable times.

Creating an array of three numbers is much faster; on my system (subtracting startup time) it’s less than 50ms, and that’s all because of compilation time. After running it once (so as to compile the random number generation and array construction routines) constructing a random array takes ~4ns.

Again, we’d like to see an issue opened in our github tracker to help figure out whats going wrong. Feel free to open one at https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia

Wait, I thought Julia was “fast Python”? If that’s not the case why would I want to switch to it from Python?

Speed depends on workload.

Fast startup, high throughput, high productivity: Choose two.

C/C++/Fortran take fast startup and high throughput, python takes fast startup and high productivity, and julia takes high productivity and high throughput.

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