Comment by BlanketLogic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BlanketLogic | Hacker News Reader

While all the points are valid what scares me most about Julia is what is covered under the section "The core language is unstable". Recently I tried the latest beta version and came across an issue - I just could not add packages. (`] add JSON` or ). No matter what package I tried to add, it failed with a stacktrace pointing to libuv. I tried downgrading to lower versions of Julia but no luck.

Turns out it is a regression introduced by a commit dated Sep 23 2020. In libuv.

As I tried to fix it, I realized Julia uses a version of libuv that is significantly diverged from libuv main branch ("123 commits ahead, 144 commits behind libuv:v1.x" as I write this comment) and the bug was in the code. Using the code from the corresponding function from libuv upstream fixed the problem.

To summarize

1. There's a bug introduced close to a year ago that breaks basic functionality on a mainstream operating system. 2. Julia has its own version of, of all things, libuv, that is significantly diverged from the original. 3. The bug is in one of the changes introduced.

While each of the above is defensible on its own. Taken together, they do scare me away from considering Julia for production use. I am hoping am wrong somewhere. I think it is a lovely language.

Do you have a link to an open issue tracking this problem?

Several Julia core devs are also libuv maintainers or contributors. The main reason for the divergence is that Julia’s libuv fork has a significantly more flexible event loop model that allows using libuv from multiple threads efficiently. The main libuv project has been reluctant to accept that change since it’s a quite advanced capability that Node doesn’t need.

Thanks for response.

> Do you have a link to an open issue tracking this problem?

Yes [#41642](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/41642)

> The main reason for the divergence is that Julia’s libuv fork has a significantly more flexible event loop model that allows using libuv from multiple threads efficiently.

Glad to hear this. That's impressive.

Thanks for the bug report (assuming that’s you that filed it). The change that broke this was made first in Julia’s libuv fork but is being upstreamed into libuv main. It simulates UNIX chmod functionality on Windows, which is (apparently) tricky to get right across all versions and all corner cases. Supporting that correctly has been an outstanding TODO in libuv for a long time — what you’re seeing is Julia driving the development of libuv and therefore hitting the bugs first.

This issue was reported seven days ago and is now slated to be fixed in the next release of all affected versions.

I don't buy the argument that not fastidiously following libuv upstream is an example of Julia not being stable. It's the opposite: that's an indicator of some measure of stability.

The situation could easily be opposite: suppose libuv does stupid things and breaks, and so if Julia tracks the daily build of libuv, it breaks.

"unstable" is not a word which means "staying on top of the development of every dependency". That could literally be a clause in a working definition of "unstable"!

If you lag behind in updating dependencies then there will be situations where you don't get some bugfix for a while

Maintaining your own fork is a good idea, because sometimes fixes are security issues from advisories. You don't necessarily want to jump to the latest and greatest libxy.so, picking up 75 other changes to fix one security item: those items are risky, because they can contain undiscovered bugs. You can carry the security patch for now and then drop it when you update.

Indeed. And in this case, the #3 contributor (and #1 in recent times, really) to Julia is also the current primary maintainer of libuv so it’s very unlikely that there would be any critical fixes that would be missed.

This particular example turns out to be a case where a feature was developed in Julia first and there’s some corner case on this poster’s Windows 10 setup that triggers a bug in the new feature.

I mean, this just looks like your run-of-the-mill bug, or? If you filter on the bug label on GitHub you will find many more. It would be interesting to try figure out what is special about your setup since no one has reported this bug since it got introduced (and it doesn't show up on any of the CI).

I was curious about that too. Many other people use Windows 10 and this is the first time this issue has come up, so there must be something else unusual going on here. If no one could install packages on Windows 10, we'd have heard about it.

I mean, that's bad and scary, but you did mention that you were using a beta version of julia. Finding this sort of thing is exactly why the beta versions exist.

If the beta was stable and ready for production, it wouldn't be called beta...

I think you missed the point where he said the bug was present in the stable release, too.

Oh I see I did misunderstand. Yes, that is unfortunate. I'd guess that since this made it into a stable release, it's likely a pretty tricky bug to encounter, since the failure is so spectacular.

I will say though that bugs appearing in stable releases of any software is a bad, but practically unavoidable thing. It sucks that this bites people, but it's not what I'd really call instability.

Oh, the problem is present in 1.6.2(current stable release) as well as v1.5.4(released March '21 available under old releases). I could not find any other 1.5+ version to try.

Yes, my apologies, it was pointed out to me below that I misread your post.

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