PackageCompiler.jl Alternatives

PackageCompiler.jl reviews and mentions

• Potential of the Julia programming language for high energy physics computing
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Dec 2023

  Yes, julia can be called from other languages rather easily, Julia functions can be exposed and called with a C-like ABI [1], and then there's also various packages for languages like Python [2] or R [3] to call Julia code.

  With PackageCompiler.jl [4] you can even make AOT compiled standalone binaries, though these are rather large. They've shrunk a fair amount in recent releases, but they're still a lot of low hanging fruit to make the compiled binaries smaller, and some manual work you can do like removing LLVM and filtering stdlibs when they're not needed.

  Work is also happening on a more stable / mature system that acts like StaticCompiler.jl [5] except provided by the base language and people who are more experienced in the compiler (i.e. not a janky prototype)

  [1] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/embedding/

  [2] https://pypi.org/project/juliacall/

  [3] https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/JuliaCall/

  [4] https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

  [5] https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl

• Strong arrows: a new approach to gradual typing
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Sep 2023
• Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust
  21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2023

  One of Julia's Achilles heels is standalone, ahead-of-time compilation. Technically this is already possible [1], [2], but there are quite a few limitations when doing this (e.g. "Hello world" is 150 MB [7]) and it's not an easy or natural process.

  The immature AoT capabilities are a huge pain to deal with when writing large code packages or even when trying to make command line applications. Things have to be recompiled each time the Julia runtime is shut down. The current strategy in the community to get around this seems to be "keep the REPL alive as long as possible" [3][4][5][6], but this isn't a viable option for all use cases.

  Until Julia has better AoT compilation support, it's going to be very difficult to develop large scale programs with it. Version 1.9 has better support for caching compiled code, but I really wish there were better options for AoT compiling small, static, standalone executables and libraries.

  [1]: https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/dev/

• What's Julia's biggest weakness?
  7 projects | /r/Julia | 18 Mar 2023

  Doesn’t work on Windows, but https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl does.

• I learned 7 programming languages so you don't have to
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2023

  Also, you can precompile a whole package and just ship the binary. We do this all of the time.

  https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

  And getting things precompiled: https://sciml.ai/news/2022/09/21/compile_time/

• Julia performance, startup.jl, and sysimages
  3 projects | /r/Julia | 19 Nov 2022

  You can have a look at PackageCompiler.jl

• Why Julia 2.0 isn’t coming anytime soon (and why that is a good thing)
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2022
• Is it possible to create a Python package with Julia and publish it on PyPi?
  6 projects | /r/Julia | 23 Apr 2022
• GenieFramework – Web Development with Julia
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2022
• Julia for health physics/radiation detection
  3 projects | /r/Julia | 9 Mar 2022

  You're probably dancing around the edges of what [PackageCompiler.jl](https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl) is capable of targeting. There are a few new capabilities coming online, namely [separating codegen from runtime](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/41936) and [compiling small static binaries](https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl), but you're likely to hit some snags on the bleeding edge.

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