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I gave up on Julia at 0.6 for these reasons a couple of years ago, before giving it another try at 1.1 Unfortunately, while the startup time has improved, I st

I gave up on Julia at 0.6 for these reasons a couple of years ago, before giving it another try at 1.1 Unfortunately, while the startup time has improved, I still find the JIT compiler overhead makes it unsuitable for most shorter scripts - the sort of thing where I would normally use python or R. Taking a few minutes to produce the first plot of the day while julia recompiles the plotting packages dependency tree is just a pain. Edit: After a fresh install of 1.1, I found loading the Plotly package takes 4 seconds from a fresh repl, while the first plot with the Plotly.jl backend (plot(rand(5,5),linewidth=2,title="My Plot")) takes 14s, and subsequent plots take less than 1s on my computer. This is a marked improvement on 0.6, which is where my few minutes came from. Couldn't get PyPlot to work.

TravisDick 7y ago
What plotting library were you using? The "first plot of the day" is a bit slow for me, but certainly it doesn't take minutes. I just opened a fresh repl and "using PyPlot" took a little over 5 seconds, and the first plot took around 1.2 seconds. Plots after that are around 0.001 seconds. Granted, if you were plotting in a small script, I guess every run would take about 7 seconds to get the plotting functionality.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Why can't "first plot of the day" be pushed into default startup overhead? Seems like a major friction point.
  - improbable22 7y ago
    This is what PackageCompiler.jl aims to do, for whatever plotting etc. packages you use all the time. It seems to work well for some people but is, right now, a bit fiddly to get set up.
dnautics 7y ago
that's literally "the plotting problem" with julia. I'm currently not actively using julia very much, but if I were, I would still be upset about it. However, for general purpose scripting that doesn't use plots, it's not a problem at all.

TravisDick 7y ago

What plotting library were you using? The "first plot of the day" is a bit slow for me, but certainly it doesn't take minutes. I just opened a fresh repl and "using PyPlot" took a little over 5 seconds, and the first plot took around 1.2 seconds. Plots after that are around 0.001 seconds. Granted, if you were plotting in a small script, I guess every run would take about 7 seconds to get the plotting functionality.

tomrod 7y ago
Why can't "first plot of the day" be pushed into default startup overhead? Seems like a major friction point.
- improbable22 7y ago
  This is what PackageCompiler.jl aims to do, for whatever plotting etc. packages you use all the time. It seems to work well for some people but is, right now, a bit fiddly to get set up.

dnautics 7y ago

that's literally "the plotting problem" with julia. I'm currently not actively using julia very much, but if I were, I would still be upset about it. However, for general purpose scripting that doesn't use plots, it's not a problem at all.