Is it possible yet to compile ahead-of-time to a stand-alone binary executable?
PackageCompilerX replaced PackageCompiler (and there's a PR open that will pull all the X work in soon).
The binaries produced bundle the whole Julia sysimage by default and they're quite big, but they are quite fast!
A more traditional static compilation approach is being tried with StaticCompiler.jl by tshort, but it's in early development.
The moment this ships, there will no longer be any reason to use any other garbage-collected language.
If your concern is about latency in real time systems, Garbage collection isn't the problem, heap allocating memory is. Julia makes it easy to never allocate anything on the heap (unlike most garbage collected langauges).
Check out this talk this discusses this in detail in the context of robotics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmWQtI3DFFo
> there will no longer be any reason to use any other garbage-collected language.
(emphasis mine). I was just curious as to why you specified garbage collected there.
However, like these other garbage-collected languages, Julia is unlikely to ever compete with the likes of Zig, Rust, C++, etc. which produce even smaller static binaries since they don't have to ship a GC runtime. That's why I specified garbage-collected languages as, in my opinion, the addition of proper static compilation will allow Julia to completely supersede other garbage-collected general programming languages but not manually managed systems programming languages.
I think with StaticCompiler.jl, if you create a binary where the compiled code knows there won't be any GC, for instance, say you only ever work with Tuples and floating point numbers, I don't think there will be any GC runtime in the compiled binary.
I could be wrong about this though.
Kind of besides the point, though, because the GC is probably not heavy anyway. Lots of fear of GC is not based on benchmarks.
Of course, you can measure the allocations, and you can see as a matter of fact whether some code allocates, but I would say that it's hard to predict what allocates and what doesn't, and that this is still changing (e.g. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/32448)