Hacker News Reader

tl;dr -- Julia is not that popular (yet!).

A pretty good indictment of the language is that a "port-mortem" didn't mention any of Julia's technical limitations, but rather its popularity.

With regards to popularity, Julia has had a lot of adaptation over the last year. And once it can produce small-ish static binaries (.so/.dll), I think there would be a surge in popularity.

View on HN

And once it can produce small-ish static binaries

That would be a real killer feature. If Julia could easily create small stand alone .exe files that I could just give to colleagues to run, that would be a seriously tempting feature.

This is a promised feature (one that Viral Shah made recently). Julia already provides user-facing compiler hooks (see JET.jl for static Julia analysis). So it theoretically should be possible for someone to create an AOT compiler today. Not sure what the current limitations are.

Check out StaticCompiler.jl. it's very beta, but it works (at least for some small problems)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com