Julia 1.12 highlights

So much goodness in this release. Struct redefinition combined with Revise.jl makes development much smoother. Package apps are also an amazing (and long awaited) feature!

I can't wait to try out trimming and see how well it actually works in its current experimental instantiation.

How's the Julia ecosystem these days? I used it for a couple of years in the early days (2013-2016ish) and things initially felt like they were going somewhere, but since then I haven't seen it make much inroads.

Any thoughts from someone more plugged in to the community today?

I'm excited to see `--trim` finally make it, but it only works when all code from entrypoints are statically inferrable. In any non-toy Julia program that's not going to be the case. Julia sorely needs a static mode and a static analyzer that can check for correctness. It also needs better sum type support and better error messages (static and runtime).

In 2020, I thought Julia would be _the_ language to use in 2025. Today I think that won't happen until 2030, if even then. The community is growing too slowly, core packages have extremely few maintainers, and Python and Rust are sucking the air out of the room. This talk at JuliaCon was a good summary of how developers using Rust are so much more productive in Rust than in Julia that they switched away from Julia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gspuMS1hSQo

Which is pretty telling. It takes a overcoming a certain inertia to move from any language.

Given all that, outside of depending heavily on DifferentialEquations.jl, I don't know why someone would pick Julia over Python + Rust.

I wish a) that I was a Julia programmer and b) that Julia had taken off instead of python for ML. I’m always jealous when I scan the docs.

> For example, the all-inference benchmarks improve by about 10%, an LLVM-heavy workload shows a similar ~10% gain, and building corecompiler.ji improves by 13–16% with BOLT. When combined with PGO and LTO, total improvements of up to ~23% have been observed.

> To build a BOLT-optimized Julia, run the following commands

Is BOLT the default build (eg. fetched by juliaup) on the supported Linux x86_64 and aarch64? I'm assuming not, based on the wording here, but I'm interested in what the blocker is and whether there's plans to make it part of the default build process. Is it considered as yet immature? Are there other downsides to it than the harmless warnings the post mentions?

Wow, there are so many amazing practical improvements in this release. It's better at both interactive use _and_ ahead-of-time compilation use. Workspaces and apps and trimmed binaries are massive - letting it easily do things normally done in other languages. It will be interesting so see what "traditional" desktop software will come out of that (CLI tools? GUI apps?).

I am so excited - well done everyone!

This is it. Anyone who's anyone has been waiting for the 1.12 release with the (admittedly experimental) juliac compiler with the --trim feature. This will allow you to create small, redistributable binaries.

This is a fantastic release, been looking forward to --trim since the 2024 JuliaCon presentation. All of the other features look like fantastic QoL additions too - especially redefinition of structs and the introduction of apps.

Congrats Julia team!

Being able to redefine structs is what I always wanted when prototyping using Revise.jl :) great to have it

Has anyone tried the `--trim` option? I wonder how well it works in "real life".

Somehow I thought Julia had been around for much longer than this.

I think Julia missed the boat with Python totally dominating the AI area.

Which is a shame, because now Python has all the same problems with the long startup time. On my computer, it takes almost 15 seconds just to import all the machine-learning libraries. And I have to do that on every app relaunch.