So I used to be a big proponent of Julia, and in some ways, I still am. But I very recently tried to write a high performance production system in it, and was sorely disappointed. The tooling is just so buggy and it's clear that the community isn't really interested in using it for anything besides modeling/research in a Jupyter notebook.
Things that kind of suck about using Julia for production:
1. Never could get Revise to work, had to restart my REPL everytime I changed any code. Even though Julia 1.6 was a lot faster than 1.5, it still took too long.
2. Couldn't find a static type checker that actually worked (I tried JET and StaticLint). I feel like static typing is just so important for a production system, but of course the community isn't really interested because of the research focus.
3. Editor tooling. The LSP server absolutely sucks. I first tried using it with emacs (both lsp-mode and eglot mode), but it would crash constantly. I think switched to VSCode (much to my chagrin), and that worked marginally better though still very poorly. It was clear that the LSP server had no idea what was going on in my macro heavy code. It couldn't jump to definitions or usages much of the time. It could never correctly determine whether a variable was unused or misspelled either. Coupled with the lack of static type checking, this was extremely frustrating.
4. Never felt like the community could answer any of my questions. If you have some research or stats question, they were great, but anything else, forget about it.
Will all of that being said, I do still use Julia for research and I find it works really well. The language is very nicely designed.
All and all, I decided to ditch Julia and decided to go with Rust (after some consideration of OCaml, but unfortunately the multi-core story still isn't there yet) and am a lot happier.
Things that kind of suck about using Julia for production:
1. Never could get Revise to work, had to restart my REPL everytime I changed any code. Even though Julia 1.6 was a lot faster than 1.5, it still took too long.
2. Couldn't find a static type checker that actually worked (I tried JET and StaticLint). I feel like static typing is just so important for a production system, but of course the community isn't really interested because of the research focus.
3. Editor tooling. The LSP server absolutely sucks. I first tried using it with emacs (both lsp-mode and eglot mode), but it would crash constantly. I think switched to VSCode (much to my chagrin), and that worked marginally better though still very poorly. It was clear that the LSP server had no idea what was going on in my macro heavy code. It couldn't jump to definitions or usages much of the time. It could never correctly determine whether a variable was unused or misspelled either. Coupled with the lack of static type checking, this was extremely frustrating.
4. Never felt like the community could answer any of my questions. If you have some research or stats question, they were great, but anything else, forget about it.
Will all of that being said, I do still use Julia for research and I find it works really well. The language is very nicely designed.
All and all, I decided to ditch Julia and decided to go with Rust (after some consideration of OCaml, but unfortunately the multi-core story still isn't there yet) and am a lot happier.