I recently began learning Julia and initially everything was amazing, except for 1 based indexing but with everything else I could overlook that. Then I attempted building something medium sized and it all fell apart. I feel like it needs some serious work on tooling, the module system, packages, etc.
Has anyone built something medium-large sized in Julia? Maybe I'm missing something. When I was trying to use modules to organize my code the response I got was that modules are more trouble than they are worth so just don't use them. So why do they even exist? That really put me off from Julia despite really liking it otherwise.
I would want to build things with it not just play in a REPL and notebooks.
Agreed, that's my experience as well. Julia is amazing for scripts and smaller projects, but I wish there was something like Swift (which I'm increasingly convinced is closest to the ultimate general-purpose language) with all the nice things that Julia has.
Specifically, these things make Julia less suitable for larger projects:
- Lack of support for OOP. And no, purely functional programming is not the best way to code all projects.
- Dynamic typing.
- Doesn't compile to native code (there are ways to do it, but too complicated and there are caveats).
- Module system doesn't seem to be design well.
- You can't use a function before it's defined.
What do you mean by that? It absolutely is compiled to e.g. x86_64 instructions by default, going through LLVM. Do you mean no standalone binaries? If so, that's actively being worked on by e.g. PackageCompiler.