For what it's worth, when building from source, the first time compile is the only one that takes an hour. After that, incremental updates are pretty quick sinc

For what it's worth, when building from source, the first time compile is the only one that takes an hour. After that, incremental updates are pretty quick since the only thing that usually changes is Julia itself, not the bucket load of source dependencies (LLVM, OpenBLAS, FFTW, GMP, etc.). Most devs pull rebuild Julia from source several times daily – this is the best way to stay bleeding edge (if that's what one wants). Even if one doesn't want to live on the bleeding edge, checking out the release-0.3 branch and building that from source is also an option. That said, the binaries are also a good way to get Julia.