Comment by blindseer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blindseer | Hacker News Reader

I would caution someone interested in this to consider some of the ramifications of using Julia / Genie. When I last used it, it was a extremely painful development experience because of the time it took to for Julia to reload when "live reload" was enabled. Further more, many features like authetication were nowhere to be found. Also, startup time for the server was SO large that it just does not work on heroku, even with PackageCompiler. And forget about using AWS Lambdas or Cloudflare pages or something like that. IMO, Rust, Go, Javascript or even Python is a waaayyy better option for this.

Kudos to the devs for continuing this work though. I'm sure it'll get there some day.

If you absolutely want to use Julia because you have an existing Julia code, you can use HTTP.jl instead. It's more lightweight and you can build routes using that into your application.

Adding a couple of responses from Genie's creator [1], when parent commenter mentioned these issues a few months ago, for visibility in case it's helpful to someone here:

> startup time for the server was SO large that it just does not work on heroku

Response: The solution (which granted should be maybe better documented) is to set the `EARLYBIND` env variable to `true` - this will allow Genie to bind to the port very early so Heroku will love it.

> many features like authetication were nowhere to be found.

Response: Genie has built in support for handling (encrypted) cookies and sessions and plugins like GenieAuthentication (or GenieAuthorisation) and SearchLight provide straightforward features. Have you used these?

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With that said, I myself do think of Genie as (currently) something to be used when (a) you already have Julia code and need a web front-end for it, or (b) you want to experiment and possibly break things for the potential of expanding horizons.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830003

Thanks for sharing the information about EARLYBIND and GenieAuthentication.

I will say that when I used EARLYBIND it still took too long for Heroku. That's not to mention that didn't solve any of the live development workflow issues.

I looked into GenieAuthetication but it doesn't support SSO and a bunch of other features that other modern authetications libraries support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com