> 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.
I don't especially want a static compiler. I'm fairly happy with Python workflow even though it's totally dynamic and interpreted, but it's dog slow on numerical stuff and the design is showing its age.
I like the "AOT-JIT" approach of Julia, and I think a separate compilation step is quite a stupid idea in the first place. I see it as some historical relic from computers with extremely limited memory (by current standards) and outdated business models that want obfuscated binaries.
My main gripe is just that I have to do it every time I run anything if I'm not using a REPL/Notebook, which drive me insane with their inconsistent and opaque global state. This could be solved mostly by caching the compilation results and compiling new stuff incrementally. But I'm starting to lose any hope that this is gonna actually happen.
Some lesser stuff follows from lack of this, but they should be relatively easily fixed.
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.