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Comment by ezluckyfree | Hacker News Reader

not to sound like a broken record, but Julia has the performance while also having dynamic memory management and an ecosystem close to Python/R (depending on the area).

Rust is nice when you want something lightweight and fast, since Julia has a pretty heavyweight runtime.

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To play an equally broken record: Have julia's ridiculously long precompilation times improved recently?

Version 1.6 (beta) is significantly faster (5-10x on my machine) than 1.5, largely due to code invalidations and parallelism. And 1.5 is faster (in both runtime and compiletime) than earlier versions.

I also imagine future iterations will focus on AOT options as well (we already have some in the form of PackageCompiler.jl),

Yes, absolutely. Version 1.5 brought significantly faster precompilation and version 1.6 (currently in beta) brings some precompilation speed improvements on top of that as well as multithreaded precompilation, so things have improved a ton in that regard.

We're expecting more benefits down the pipe as well with better AOT compilation support so you don't have to redo compilation so much between sessions.

Compilation and precompilation latency have been the two most consistent focuses of the developer team over the past couple years.

Thanks, looks like I should give julia a try again.

Yes, Julia looks very impressive, a language I'd like to try at some point.

"Lightweight and fast" are the key features I'm looking for.

Julia is cool, but can I have a version where arrays start at zero?

No need for another version, Julia supports custom indices by default. Check out https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/offset-arrays/ and https://github.com/JuliaArrays/OffsetArrays.jl

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