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Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

You can have what you want here by using DaemonMode.jl

https://github.com/dmolina/DaemonMode.jl

It would be nice if their was an "offline version" of this, e.g. automagically cache all compiled code to disk. Daemon mode isn't restart-friendly.

That's basically what PackageCompiler does. That said, StaticCompiler.jl is expected to improve the state of this in the future.

Not quite. PackageCompiler isn't automagic. The sysimage doesn't get automatically updated in the REPL. You have to create one manually (and this requires tracing instead of static type inference which Julia can do). So the workflow isn't zero-friction. And StaticCompiler hasn't been updated in over a year.

The problem with Julia tooling in general is that they feel 90% done. And tooling is, in my opinion, more important than the language itself.

> So the workflow isn't zero-friction. And StaticCompiler hasn't been updated in over a year.

There's much more recent work here: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and apparently some more is still ongoing privately.

That said, yeah. I would not recommend Julia currently for people who truly believe they need AOT compilation, and that they need to trigger AOT compilation very often and with low friction. That definitely needs more work, but it's happening.

That said, a lot of people overestimate how much they actually need AOT compilation.

Julia has some fantastic tooling in other areas though. Especially the package management and interactive analysis tools.

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