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I think the real test will be whether or not Julia's custodians / developers start putting a greater focus on semantics and correctness. When a language's rais

I think the real test will be whether or not Julia's custodians / developers start putting a greater focus on semantics and correctness. When a language's raison d'être is to try out certain ideas, it probably makes sense for a while to ignore corner cases and rigor. But as the author points out, they eventually become gating factors for wider adoption.

NeutralForest 4y ago
It's still at version 1.x, maybe an explicit roadmap could help tackling those issues?
markkitti 4y ago
The question here is are these merely just bugs or is there something about the language that makes Julia error prone? There is potential in using Julia's type inference engine to check for correctness. For example see JET.jl. "JET.jl employs Julia's type inference to detect potential bugs." https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eOiGc8wfE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eOiGc8wfE0 The video brings up some potential difficulties with Julia's metaprogramming facilities for static or lexical analysis, but also shows that these issues are also addressable. The type inference system could be exploited for further effect. For example, the type system could be extended to check for shape information within the type as demonstrated in this prototype: https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1407810981338796035 https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1407810981338796035 Julia has guard rails (e.g. default bounds checking), but also also provides facilities to work outside them (`@inbounds`, `unsafe_*` methods, `ccall`, in-place methods with a `!` suffix). Typically these provide features that trade safety for performance or access to features. Used judiciously one can achieve a balance between performance and safety. Julia is not a language that restricts its users to a sandbox in the name of safety, but it does provide bounds of where the sandbox is and is not. Another take away from the original blog post is that much Julia development is happening in the open on Github. These issues and their fixes just require a Github account to contribute to. Is this a feature?
- freemint 4y ago
  Jet.jl is far from a solution. Over short or long JuliaComputing (or someone else) will have to pay people full time to develop such tools if it wants to see larger adoption. Nobody expects Julia to be system language a language you write an OS in). The later those tools come the more code will need to be fixed up.

NeutralForest 4y ago

It's still at version 1.x, maybe an explicit roadmap could help tackling those issues?

markkitti 4y ago

The question here is are these merely just bugs or is there something about the language that makes Julia error prone? There is potential in using Julia's type inference engine to check for correctness. For example see JET.jl. "JET.jl employs Julia's type inference to detect potential bugs." https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eOiGc8wfE0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eOiGc8wfE0 The video brings up some potential difficulties with Julia's metaprogramming facilities for static or lexical analysis, but also shows that these issues are also addressable. The type inference system could be exploited for further effect. For example, the type system could be extended to check for shape information within the type as demonstrated in this prototype: https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1407810981338796035 https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1407810981338796035 Julia has guard rails (e.g. default bounds checking), but also also provides facilities to work outside them (`@inbounds`, `unsafe_*` methods, `ccall`, in-place methods with a `!` suffix). Typically these provide features that trade safety for performance or access to features. Used judiciously one can achieve a balance between performance and safety. Julia is not a language that restricts its users to a sandbox in the name of safety, but it does provide bounds of where the sandbox is and is not. Another take away from the original blog post is that much Julia development is happening in the open on Github. These issues and their fixes just require a Github account to contribute to. Is this a feature?

freemint 4y ago
Jet.jl is far from a solution. Over short or long JuliaComputing (or someone else) will have to pay people full time to develop such tools if it wants to see larger adoption. Nobody expects Julia to be system language a language you write an OS in). The later those tools come the more code will need to be fixed up.