I'm happy to see static compilation in the works! If static compilation takes off, and people are able to build Python packages that are secretly just compiled Julia code, I can see a world where more people opt to using Julia over C or C++. Though writing Rust libraries that work as Python packages is a joy and Julia would still have competition.<p>Julia biggest problem at the moment is growth. Julia has suffered from not having exponential growth, and has either maintained a small linear growth or has fallen in popularity. Search online on YouTube for tutorials, on Twitch for WatchPeopleCode, or on GitHub for benchmarks; and Julia is not even in the room where the conversation is happening - there just isn't any mindshare.<p>And for good reason. There are so many ergonomic challenges when using Julia in a large codebase and in a large team. Julia has no formal interfaces, LSP suggestions that are often just wrong, and no option types. This just makes writing Julia code a drag. And it makes it quite difficult to advocate to developers experienced with languages that offer these features.<p>Additionally, the core conceit pushed by Julia advocates is that the language is fast. This is true in controlled benchmarks but in real-world scenarios and in practice it is a real pain to write and maintain code that is fast for high velocity teams because it requires a lot of discipline and a strong understanding of memory allocation and assumptions the Julia can and cannot make. You can write code that is blazingly fast, and then you make a change somewhere else in your program and suddenly your code crawls to a halt. We've had test code that goes from taking 10 minutes to run to over 2 hours because of type instability in a single line of code. Finding this was non-trivial. For reference, if this were uncaught our production version would have gone from 8 hours to 4 days.<p>The lack of growth really hurts the language. Search for pretty much any topic under the sun and you'll find a Python package and possibly even a Rust crate. In Julia you are usually writing one from scratch. Packages are essential to data processing are contributor strained. If you have a somewhat unpopular open source code code you rely on that doesn't work quite work the way you want it to, you might think I'll just submit a PR but it can languish for months to a year.<p>The Julia community needs to look at what programming languages are offering that Julia developers want and will benefit from. The software world changing very quickly and Julia needs to change too to keep up.