Idea: Compile Julia programs into binaries

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello everyone,

Here is a possibly crazy idea: Since Julia is already a compiled language, how difficult would it be to have Julia produce an actual stand-alone binary?

I am not sure how useful this would be. It could be used to distribute Julia programs without requiring users to install Julia, but I don't think Julia is hard to install in the first place, so I don't know if that's very important... It would also help for small Julia programs that you run often, because you'd save the compile step. Again, I don't know how critical this is. So I was just curious.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[Tobias Knopp]

Hi Daniel,

There were various dicussions in julia-dev and julia-users. Searching for "standalone" should give you some answers.
In short: Its on the roadmap, it is definately feasible, there is even work beeing done in one of Jeffs branches, but my guess is that this will not land in the next year in an official release.

Cheers,

Tobi

[Daniel Carrera]

Thanks!

--
When an engineer says that something can't be done, it's a code phrase that means it's not fun to do.

[Stefan Karpinski]

This is not a crazy idea at all – it's just something that most dynamic languages are not in good shape to do. It's definitely something we want and that a fair amount of work has already gone into.