Lack of stack straces and poor error messages hasn't hindered the adoption of most compiled languages.

Naturally it is something to improve, but I bet that are still bigger fish to fry.

Different users have different problems. I’ll take the recent major advances in, say, start up time and multi threading instead of improvements to the error messages.

The debugger has helped a lot for me.

https://julialang.org/blog/2019/03/debuggers/#debugger_and_r...

I think this is quite a hard problem to solve. A Python wrapper of some some monolithic C library can check & reject any input which doesn't meet the spec, and tell you why. But a Julia library typically wants to be generic, you should (for instance) be able to pass it weird numbers that contain units/error bars/gradient info, that the library designer knew nothing about, and have these propagate through. When this works it's great, but when it fails, the failure point tends to be 10 layers down, in internal workings you've never heard of. That's part of why error messages are inscrutable.

It's being worked on. I am rather excited for the upcoming work that makes the parser replaceable and allows us to actually give good syntax errors! There is some discussion about making error printing more configurable so that one can skip stack-frames that are unlikely to be the cause (albeit that's a double-edged sword).

As walnuss says below, these things are already being worked on. If you tried Julia a few months or couple of years ago, you'll find that stacktraces have already got quite a lot better.

One of the things that the Julia community could greatly benefit from is more compiler contributors. Languages like Rust naturally attract compiler folks, and those like Go have the backing of Google.

Julia has more complex compiler due to our dynamic type system, which the users absolutely love. But it also puts a lot of strain on the compiler team, which is quite small. So if any folks with experience in compiler technology on HN are looking for interesting projects to contribute to, please do look into Julia.

We've done better over the years increasing our bus number on the compiler codebase overall. More contributions in all areas of the toolchain would be great to have!

I don't think that there's a silver bullet for this. A compiler can only tell you where it caught an error: telling you where the error occurred is equivalent to the hard AI problem.

On the other hand, we the users can do a lot to help. After you've worked through those 30 stack frames to find the one that went wrong, you could send a PR to detect that. In many cases, I suspect it would help to just catch the error then re-throw it from the method that went wrong.