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I heard a talk from a large cybersecurity company that was using Julia for research and is apparently in the process of dropping Julia due to: - difficulty in

I heard a talk from a large cybersecurity company that was using Julia for research and is apparently in the process of dropping Julia due to: - difficulty in hiring, apparently it was too expensive/difficult to hire Julia programmers, - poorly performing garbage collector. If I recall correctly, they had issues when trying to process huge amounts of data. Seems like small teams will not run into these issues at least initially. I really like Julia and I hope it becomes huge, but stories like this make me wonder whether the whole Julia ecosystem will ever mature to a level of Python for example. And in turn, making it viable for large organizations that might be using e.g. Python + C++ combo that might be easier to hire for/more versatile/with better known drawbacks. Essentially, I am not sure whether the potential of Julia is that much greater than the realized potential of the incumbents to warrant the "Julia is the language of the future".

logankilpatrick 4y ago
Please put them in touch with me if possible. RelationalAI has similar GC issues which they are the core Julia developers are working hard to resolve. I have also seen zero postings for Julia roles in cyber security companies so it is likely that they aren't tapping into the community which is why they can't find people.
- vHMtsdf 4y ago
  It was a talk by folks from this team: https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/ https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/
europeanguy 4y ago
If you care about performance your code shouldn't be allocating.
warinukraine 4y ago
My (more or less extensive) experience with Julia has been rather good. Step 1. Prototyping. Small data, don't care about performance. Julia is as easy as python, but faster. GC doesn't matter. Step 2. Production. Very large datasets. Performance is very important so I make sure that hot loops don't allocate, and so GC doesn't matter. Really, I struggle to see how someone can not like this. Regarding hiring. My experience has been that you can roughly divide people into two categories. Those who like using tools, and those who like solving problems. For the former, a different language might be an issue because they might not know and might not be in the mood for learning it. For the latter, they're happy to learn any tool that can help solve their problem. We want the latter, and for the latter learning Julia hasn't been an issue.
- vHMtsdf 4y ago
  I am not exactly sure what they were working on, but I am not convinced that any code can be made non-allocating easily. For example, when you are building large trees with complex structures in the nodes and you need to both add/remove the nodes, the effort to make it non-allocating might be too much compared to just using C++ and writing things more naturally?

logankilpatrick 4y ago

Please put them in touch with me if possible. RelationalAI has similar GC issues which they are the core Julia developers are working hard to resolve. I have also seen zero postings for Julia roles in cyber security companies so it is likely that they aren't tapping into the community which is why they can't find people.

vHMtsdf 4y ago
It was a talk by folks from this team: https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/ https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/

europeanguy 4y ago

If you care about performance your code shouldn't be allocating.

warinukraine 4y ago

My (more or less extensive) experience with Julia has been rather good. Step 1. Prototyping. Small data, don't care about performance. Julia is as easy as python, but faster. GC doesn't matter. Step 2. Production. Very large datasets. Performance is very important so I make sure that hot loops don't allocate, and so GC doesn't matter. Really, I struggle to see how someone can not like this. Regarding hiring. My experience has been that you can roughly divide people into two categories. Those who like using tools, and those who like solving problems. For the former, a different language might be an issue because they might not know and might not be in the mood for learning it. For the latter, they're happy to learn any tool that can help solve their problem. We want the latter, and for the latter learning Julia hasn't been an issue.

vHMtsdf 4y ago
I am not exactly sure what they were working on, but I am not convinced that any code can be made non-allocating easily. For example, when you are building large trees with complex structures in the nodes and you need to both add/remove the nodes, the effort to make it non-allocating might be too much compared to just using C++ and writing things more naturally?