Yeah, not frowned upon at all. StaticCompiler.jl [1] has made huge strides in the past few weeks actually thanks to Mason and Valentin (swapping in GPUCompiler as the backend); you can even compile to a tiny standalone binary without linking to the runtime if you're willing to use some tricks e.g. [2] to avoid GC allocations (stack allocations and manual heap allocations are both fine):
# This is all StaticCompiler-friendly
using StaticTools
function print_args(argc::Int, argv::Ptr{Ptr{UInt8}})
# c"..." lets you construct statically-sized, stack allocated `StaticString`s
# We also have m"..." and MallocString if you want the same thing but on the heap
printf(c"Argument count is %d:\n", argc)
for i=1:argc
# iᵗʰ input argument string
pᵢ = unsafe_load(argv, i) # Get pointer
strᵢ = MallocString(pᵢ) # Can wrap to get high-level interface
println(strᵢ)
# No need to `free` since we didn't allocate this memory
end
println(c"That was fun, see you next time!")
return 0
end
# Compile executable
using StaticCompiler # `] add https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl` to get latest master
filepath = compile_executable(print_args, (Int64, Ptr{Ptr{UInt8}}), "./")
yielding:
shell> ./print_args 1 2 3 4 5.0 foo
Argument count is 7:
./print_args
1
2
3
4
5.0
foo
That was fun, see you next time!
shell> hyperfine './print_args hello there'
Benchmark 1: ./print_args hello there
Time (mean ± σ): 2.2 ms ± 0.5 ms [User: 0.8 ms, System: 0.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 1.5 ms … 5.5 ms 564 runs
Warning: Command took less than 5 ms to complete. Results might be inaccurate.
shell> ls -lh print_args
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user staff 8.5K Feb 10 02:36 print_args
GC allocations
are allowed if you use instead the approach in this PR [3], but we haven't wrangled that approach to produce standalone binaries yet.
[1] https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl
[2] https://github.com/brenhinkeller/StaticTools.jl
[3] https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/58