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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I have never really heard the name "two language problem" to refer to what you are describing. Whenever I have heard these words it has referred to "I want a high-productivity newbie-friendly introspective language like python, but I do not want to write C modules when I need fast inner loops". Julia seems to solve this already, without providing compact binaries.

A sibling comment made a point about "compiling down to shared libraries" which seems similar to what you are describing, but that seems like it has little to do with "the two language problem".

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Right. It used to be referenced on the front page of julialang.org Seems they don't really use that in the sale pitch anymore. Maybe that proves my point. It's easy to find references to julia claiming to solve the two-language problem though. I am someone who this two-language problem they speak of addresses.

I love Julia. Which is why it's so painful that I have to rewrite all my elegant Julia prototype code in C++, so I can compile into a shared lib for the users. Every. Single. Time. Two languages.

Now that it isn't the main front and centre claim, I feel a bit less bitter about using it as a prototyping language.

Waiting another 5 years and maybe it really will solve the two-language problem.

It could only solve the two language problem if the "users" were writing their program in Julia themselves. Otherwise your ideal solution is still using two languages. And if they are writing their program in Julia, there's no reason to compile your code into a shared library; you'd just share a Julia package with them.

I think the main reason they stopped referencing that claim is that "two-language problem" means too many different things to different people. But yes, real static compilation would be great.

I think this is correct. My understanding of the two-language problem was probably not the same as the one they claimed to solve. More likely they meant: write slow code in python and then optimize inner loops with c.

Anyways, I'm glad I did invest in learning Julia. Just disappointed it didn't save me from C++. On to Rust!

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