I feel that the time to migrate to Julia is now. The ecosystem is finally coming together and there doesn't seem to be breaking changes to the language anymore.
The startup time was a blocker last time I jumped in (mid-2021). Have things changed ?
It has improved gradually. The community is targeting latency optimizations in the entire ecosystem, and that effort has been moving rapidly.
Plots is still a problem for me. Rust and Julia have a lot in common in this respect, but I will gladly take the advantages of their package management systems if it means a longer compilation time.
TLDR: no. 1.7 is marginally better than 1.6 for startup time, but it's not a massive change.
I don't see how it can while their "load a module" step involved compiling it from C++ source. Although I guess that doesn't explain why it is still so slow the subsequent times.
Can you elaborate? How does loading a Julia module involve compiling c++?
The module gets compiled from source.
Yes, but not from C++, but from Julia source code. Or what are you referring to?
“Compiling Julia” means lowering into LLVM IR that then gets compiled. It’s not C++ but it takes roughly as long
PackageCompiler.jl helps significantly, but it's still an issue.