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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

How easy it is to produce a compiled executable in 1.6? I took a cursory look at the docs but couldn't spot the steps for doing so.

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That's coming. Pieces are there but still need polish and integration. Fib was around 44kb with no runtime required.

Check out staticcompiler.jl

In your experience, what are the current limitations?

There's all sorts of limitations right now. E.g. you can't allocate an array right now, dynamic dispatch is prohibited, there are some bugs too.

Most of this is just a relic from StaticCompiler.jl being a very straightforward slight repurposing of GPUCompiler.jl. It will take some work to make it robust on CPU code, but the path to doing so it pretty strightforward. It just requires dedicated work, but it's not a top priority for anyone who has the know-how currently.

I'd love to be able to contribute to this, somewhat new to Julia, but I'm sure I could help with something ...

Do you have any links to what has been currently done?

EDIT: Found this thread so far: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/statically-compiled-and-st...

This is the PR to look at if you want to try and help: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46

I think this isn't really a great place for beginners though unfortunately. This project is tightly coupled to undocumented internals of not only julia's compiler, but also LLVM.jl and GPUCompiler.jl. It'll require a lot of learning to be able to meaningfully contribute at this stage.

Where do you recommend an experienced Julia user start working on internals/core tools?

What's the difference between StaticCompiler.jl and PackageCompiler.jl? Doesn't the latter also let you build "apps"?

We did it for production code installed at client sites, and it has been very easy for us. YMMV

I’ve also looked for this, does it mean that I have to install julia on the target machine and it’ll recompile when running?

Or are there steps to produce a binary (much like Go or C or Rust)??

Currently you can make a relocatable “bundle” / “app” with PackageCompiler.jl, but the bundle itself includes a Julia runtime.

Making a nice small static binary is technically possible using an approach similar to what GPUCompiler.jl does, but the CPU equivalent of that isn’t quite ready for primetime.

You forgot to mention that a 'Hello World' standalone file is about 0.5 GB!

I think something to that effect was implicit in "the bundle itself includes a Julia runtime," but I vouched for this comment anyway since it's an important limitation and the parent comment evidently wasn't explicit enough to prevent confusion.

Elsewhere someone says “Fib was around 44kb with no runtime required”. Which is correct?

They are talking about two different systems. Static compilation is a separate project which is trying to include only those compiled code that is required. That isn't ready yet for normal people like me, but if you have the knowhow and your program meets certain requirements you can get a tiny binary.

PackageCompiler.jl just compiles everything and packages it up. It generates huge files, because it doesn't discriminate on which compiled stuff to include.

I see, thanks. Looks like static compilation will only work if the entire program is “type stable”, which AFAICT means that the type of every variable can be deduced statically.

Thank you for your reply! PackageCompiler looks like the right way.

Do you happen have any links to the static binary procedure? Or links to the current state of efforts for this?

https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46

You probably want to check out PackageCompiler.jl (https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/dev/)

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