Hacker News Reader

Let's even put raw numbers to it. DifferentialEquations.jl usage has seen compile times drop from 22 seconds to 3 seconds over the last few months.

https://github.com/SciML/DifferentialEquations.jl/issues/786

View on HN

Yeah, I should not have used "increasingly", yet what you are pointing out is an example of an improvement in a single module, not the language compiler & llvm. It does not actually prove the original comment wrong.

Almost all of the improvements came from changes to Julia's Base that improved compilation times and changes to tooling which suggest trivial changes to improve compilation times. In v1.5 or so this would've been a heroic feat. In v1.7 this is something any undergrad could do in a weekend to any module. So yes that proves that things have changed quite a bit.

It's not due to effort that is specific to a single module. It reflects an improvement in the community's understanding of what patterns causes slow compile times and also tooling that helps improve compile times by reducing method invalidations.

There may well have also been improvements in the Julia compiler.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com