In terms of “don’t make me think about why Julia is fast but feels slow for casual use” this release is going to be a game changer.

I just did a “using Plots” in 1.6.0, and it was fast enough to not care about the delta between Plots and, say, R loading ggplot.

Huge kudos to the Julia team.

I agree, this is a game changer. Previously time to first plot (TTFP) was >1 minute for me, which made julia completely unusable for my day-to-day exploratory data analysis, visualisation, quick random number experiments etc. Now TTFP is less than 10 seconds. I'm now ready (and excited) to jump ship from R and python!

That was also a huge problem for me. I sometimes open Stata/R/Python/Excel, run a few snippets, and I'm done.

All four take seconds to start (or even less), and Julia felt like a huge step back in productivity.

If it's really fixed, might be good trying again.

       _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
      (_)     | (_) (_)    |
       _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
      | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
      | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.6.0 (2021-03-24)
     _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
    |__/                   |
    
    (@v1.6) pkg> add Plots
        Updating registry at `~/.julia/registries/General`
        Updating git-repo `https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General.git`
       Resolving package versions...
       Installed Qt_jll ─ v5.15.2+3
      Downloaded artifact: Qt
        Updating `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml`
      [91a5bcdd] + Plots v1.11.0
        Updating `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Manifest.toml`
      [ede63266] ↑ Qt_jll v5.15.2+2 ⇒ v5.15.2+3
      Progress [========================================>]  246/246
    246 dependencies successfully precompiled in 140 seconds
    
    julia> @time using Plots
      3.689727 seconds (6.58 M allocations: 472.965 MiB, 7.49% gc time, 0.13% compilation time)
    
    julia> @time begin
           using Plots
           x = 1:10; y = rand(10); # These are the plotting data
           plot(x, y)
           end
      3.050765 seconds (3.63 M allocations: 218.824 MiB, 4.87% gc time, 59.07% compilation time)
    
    julia> @time begin
           using Plots
           x = 1:10; y = rand(10); # These are the plotting data
           plot(x, y)
           end
      0.001435 seconds (2.61 k allocations: 161.836 KiB)