Julia 1.6 addresses latency issues

It is amazing and frustrating to me how much latency affects my productivity. I wish I could more effortlessly switch between tasks, or just meditate and relax while I wait for something I just did on the REPL to finish. But I don't. More often than not, a 30-second delay to e.g. plot something destroys my ability to stay in a productive zone.

I have been using Julia 1.6 since the release, and I'm so grateful not only that some computations run a bit faster, but that the interactivity is so improved.

Even seeing a progress bar can help me stay focused, because it can be fun to watch (parallel precompilation is especially fun). When a command just hangs, I feel left in the dark about how much boredom I'll have to endure.

I'm a big fan of Julia. It does live up to its speed claims. I've implemented the board game Go in Python, Rust, and Julia and Julia is definitely closer to Rust in speed. Same algorithms were used for all implementations.

Julia's time to first plot still has some problems. The Plots library can build animations, but the time to first animation on my computer is like 10 minutes, and the time to second animation is another 10 minutes. Probably just a bug, I haven't found any other case that takes so long.

I've also mentioned before that a reinforcement learning algorithm I ported from Python/PyTorch to Flux was faster, not because of training times, but because of all the other stuff (and RL has more "other stuff" than supervised learning) that goes on outside the core training loop is so much faster.

For me the issue manifested as a 10 sec latency to format a Julia file using Format.jl

Solved via flags to disable JIT and brought it down to a couple of secs. Native binary would be much nicer.

I am very confused by the claim in the first sentence of the article: "On March 24, version 1.6.0 of the Julia programming language was released. This is the first feature release since 1.0 came out in 2018". How is 1.6 a "feature release", but 1.1-1.5 are not!? Especially given the enormous new set of multi-threading features in 1.3.

Edit: ah, thanks for the response, it seem I just do not know the difference between "feature" and "timed" release.

That’s the terminology used in the development process. The releases > 1.0 and < 1.6 are called “timed releases”. It doesn’t mean they don’t contain any new features.