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I'd like to see a way to specify interfaces / traits, in the base package itself. I would also like to see a better test suite, with the ability to run a singl

I'd like to see a way to specify interfaces / traits, in the base package itself. I would also like to see a better test suite, with the ability to run a single test if I want to. Test Driven Development on a large project is a nightmare (although it's gotten a little better recently). I still can't believe how people contribute to Base Julia, because running the tests takes forever. Lastly, better support for debugging in Neovim, Vim, Emacs etc. Better linting tools too. There's a push in other languages to write core language tooling in Rust or Zig, I think Julia would benefit from that approach (there's `juliaup` but I'd like to see more official tools similar to this). Personally I'd like to see SetField.jl or Accessors.jl in Base. I'd also like to see improvements in the ergonomics of using immutable structs. In Julia, users should want to use immutable structs all the time, and ONLY if they need reference semantics they should want to reach for mutable structs. I think the naming and the sematics here is REALLLYY confusing when trying to get a team to write performant code. I can't tell you how many times I've had this kind of conversation with various members in my team. Me: Create a struct for holding all that related data together F: Okay, let me create a struct. - Refactors code base for a day - Realizes the data is being updated - Uses mutable structs Me: Don't use mutable structs unless you want reference semantics F: What even is reference semantics? - Tries to refactor by removing the `mutable` keyword, code breaks when doing `a.b += 1`, writes messy code like `a = A(B(a.b + 1, a.b.c, a.b.d, ...), a.c, a.d, ...)`. Me: Ugh, why didn't you use `SetField` instead? F: No unnecessary extra dependencies to reduce complexity. Project Manager: Where are we with this task? Just use mutable struct and move on. Me: Sigh. Fine. On a non-language side of things, 1) it would be nice to have a bigger focus on teaching how to write performant Julia code. Currently, most if not all the material is geared toward someone who already knows how to write performance code (in C++ for example) and showing them the "Julian" way to do it. 2) I'd like to see a usability survey done from Julia users to see what features should be tackled next.

ChrisRackauckas 4y ago
> Personally I'd like to see SetField.jl or Accessors.jl in Base. I'd also like to see improvements in the ergonomics of using immutable structs. In Julia, users should want to use immutable structs all the time, and ONLY if they need reference semantics they should want to reach for mutable structs. I think the naming and the sematics here is REALLLYY confusing when trying to get a team to write performant code. I can't tell you how many times I've had this kind of conversation with various members in my team. I agree that one of these should be standardized to be a Base functionality. But that won't need a v2.0 for that to happen: it can happen in a v1.x. > it would be nice to have a bigger focus on teaching how to write performant Julia code. Currently, most if not all the material is geared toward someone who already knows how to write performance code (in C++ for example) and showing them the "Julian" way to do it. The issue is that many of these tricks are actively being addressed, for example with escape analysis to reduce allocations. So what really needs to be taught is how to profile and understand what the code is doing, and how to effect it to do what one wants for performance. That then increases the barrier to entry. I think we shouldn't be teaching people "how to write performant Julia code" much more than is already out there though: since most of the tricks are really just workarounds for missing optimizations, those compiler optimizations should just get added (and there's some work showing it is possible).

ChrisRackauckas 4y ago

> Personally I'd like to see SetField.jl or Accessors.jl in Base. I'd also like to see improvements in the ergonomics of using immutable structs. In Julia, users should want to use immutable structs all the time, and ONLY if they need reference semantics they should want to reach for mutable structs. I think the naming and the sematics here is REALLLYY confusing when trying to get a team to write performant code. I can't tell you how many times I've had this kind of conversation with various members in my team. I agree that one of these should be standardized to be a Base functionality. But that won't need a v2.0 for that to happen: it can happen in a v1.x. > it would be nice to have a bigger focus on teaching how to write performant Julia code. Currently, most if not all the material is geared toward someone who already knows how to write performance code (in C++ for example) and showing them the "Julian" way to do it. The issue is that many of these tricks are actively being addressed, for example with escape analysis to reduce allocations. So what really needs to be taught is how to profile and understand what the code is doing, and how to effect it to do what one wants for performance. That then increases the barrier to entry. I think we shouldn't be teaching people "how to write performant Julia code" much more than is already out there though: since most of the tricks are really just workarounds for missing optimizations, those compiler optimizations should just get added (and there's some work showing it is possible).