StaticCompiler.jl

Regarding all the questions about Julia: There's ongoing work to reduce runtime dependencies of Julia (for example in 1.8, you can strip out the compiler and metadata), but then it's only approaching Go/Swift and other static languages with runtimes. Generating standalone runtime free LLVM is another path, that is actually already pretty mature as it's what is being done for the GPU stack. Someone just has to retarget that to cpu LLVM, and there's a start here: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/issues/43

> So the workflow isn't zero-friction. And StaticCompiler hasn't been updated in over a year. There's much more recent work here: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and apparently some more is still ongoing privately. That said, yeah. I would not recommend Julia currently for people who truly believe they need AOT compilation, and that they need to trigger AOT compilation very often and with low friction. That definitely needs more work, but it's happening. That said, a lot of people overestimate how much they actually need AOT compilation. Julia has some fantastic tooling in other areas though. Especially the package management and interactive analysis tools.

I hope it'll get there! If anyone wants to help out, check out (e.g.) https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46

A fun fact is that the GPUCompiler, which compiles the code to run in GPU's, is the current way to generate binaries without hiding the whole ~200mb of julia runtime in the binary. https://github.com/JuliaGPU/GPUCompiler.jl/ https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/

> Us CLI folks are not even asking for much. Just a way to call a program with arguments and so that you don't have to do compile identical code every time you do something. That's it. Is that unreasonable? Look, everyone wants static compilation, and it's almost certainly going to happen eventually. It's not unreasonable at all to want that. The only thing that would be unreasonable is to (apparently repeatedly!) imply or assert that this lack of static compilation (and/or better caching) is due to some bizarre perversion on the part of the community. If you want it to happen faster, then stop complaining about it on HN, get familiar with the current attempts at true static compilation in e.g. https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 and start contributing yourself.

This is the PR to look at if you want to try and help: https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/46 I think this isn't really a great place for beginners though unfortunately. This project is tightly coupled to undocumented internals of not only julia's compiler, but also LLVM.jl and GPUCompiler.jl. It'll require a lot of learning to be able to meaningfully contribute at this stage.