I’m kind of sad, because I think I have completed the journey from advocating for Julia at my first job to becoming a full-blown hater. I have complaints about the type system and the general failure of a good autograd library to emerge as the standard/default.
But my main complaint about Julia is its general approach to memory management. You are encouraged to think about how memory is being allocated e.g. by using StaticArrays for smaller, immutable arrays, or pre-allocating the arrays and operating on them in-place. But you don’t actually have control over allocations, and it’s easy for some type instability to cause unnecessary allocations - even after you stick a bunch of type annotations which should give the compiler sufficient information to force type stability or at least crash/fail to type check.
At this point I think people are better off investing their time/efforts into Rust for computationally heavy workloads on the CPU (polars for data frame stuff, ndarray for numpy functionality, Enzyme for autodiff) and using torch/jax for GPU-centric work (also, it’s significantly easier to write python bindings for rust libraries than C++ or Julia libs).
But my main complaint about Julia is its general approach to memory management. You are encouraged to think about how memory is being allocated e.g. by using StaticArrays for smaller, immutable arrays, or pre-allocating the arrays and operating on them in-place. But you don’t actually have control over allocations, and it’s easy for some type instability to cause unnecessary allocations - even after you stick a bunch of type annotations which should give the compiler sufficient information to force type stability or at least crash/fail to type check.
At this point I think people are better off investing their time/efforts into Rust for computationally heavy workloads on the CPU (polars for data frame stuff, ndarray for numpy functionality, Enzyme for autodiff) and using torch/jax for GPU-centric work (also, it’s significantly easier to write python bindings for rust libraries than C++ or Julia libs).