Hacker News Reader

Comment by DNF2 | Hacker News Reader

Just to manage expectations: As far as I understand, v1.9 doesn't by itself solve TTFP/precompilation. The tweet seems slightly over-enthusiastic. But it puts tools to solve it in the hands of package developers.

In that sense, one can perhaps say it is a turning point.

View on HN

While that is an accurate statement, my go-to package where compile time and startup time was a huge hurdle, Plots.jl, just works instantaneously now. That is the case for many packages already, and I suspect that after 1.9 releases, it will quickly become more commonplace.

Ah, thank you for that context. Assuming this mechanism doesn’t have any major tradeoffs, I think it seems likely that popular packages will make use of it?

Yes, I think so (and many already have)

It's very likely. I've only occasionally used in julia for a couple of years and I've been doing various hacks to improve load/compile times for my private packages pretty much since the beginning, so I imagine more experienced programmers would jump at it.

Two tradeoffs to be aware of:

1. Slightly longer compile times at package install time, but that is ok since it is a one time cost.

2. During package development, building a pkgimage every time will lead to longer compile times because of native code generation. That is easily disabled during development with `julia --pkgimages=no`.

The popular packages are already preparing for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com