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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

It became less relevant in the age of Julia language.

That's a weird claim without specifying the context. Julia doesn't run python code, so that's not it. It doesn't use python's programmers... etc.

Is it "for new code which is maths/vector heavy and not relying on any existing environment, Julia is a valid competitor to pypy"? Or is there a better qualifier?

On the contrary, Julia might be the kick on the Python world to finally start discussing about having something like PyPy as standard.

Eh, there are still huge legacy codebaes around that benefit from pypy, not everything is worth a rewrite

Currently my greatest concern is the inability of Julia to provide stability even after they've reached 1.0. On paper 1.0 is a LTS release and still supported, but how many packages actually support it anymore? There seems to be no guidelines either, the official stance is that "we move on and drop LTS when the package developers move on."

>but how many packages actually support it anymore?

99%? You won't get the most recent versions because a lot of packages started requiring v1.3 when the new AD and multhreading mechanisms came out, but you can still boot up the LTS and run any standard analysis that existed back when 1.0 was around, which is something like 3000+ packages. Where is your FUD coming from?

Do you have numbers to back this up?

See https://lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/fast-high-level-programming...

Also I should note that Julia performance greatly improved since. Next week there should be the 1.6.0 release, which will have even better numbers.

> I don’t see Julia a good replacement of Python. Julia has a long startup time. When you use a large package like Bio.jl, Julia may take 30 seconds to compile the code, longer than the actual running time of your scripts. You may not feel it is fast in practice. Actually in my benchmark, Julia is not really as fast as other languages, either. Probably my Julia implementations here will get most slaps. I have seen quite a few you-are-holding-the-phone-wrong type of responses from Julia supporters. Also importantly, the Julia developers do not value backward compatibility. There may be a python2-to-3 like transition in several years if they still hold their views by then. I wouldn’t take the risk.

I doubt that Julia 1.6.0 will be released next week. There were no rc (release candidates) not even an alpha or beta release.

I probably messed up something, but I meant alpha, yes.

It always depends on what applications you're looking for, but yes there's tons.

https://benchmarks.sciml.ai/html/MultiLanguage/wrapper_packa...

https://gist.github.com/ChrisRackauckas/cc6ac746e2dfd285c28e...

https://gist.github.com/ChrisRackauckas/4a4d526c15cc4170ce37...

are the ones from the top of my head.

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