Why I no longer recommend Julia

For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.

I published a handful of open-source packages for things like signed distance fields, nearest-neighbor search, and Turing patterns (among others), made visual explanations of Julia concepts like broadcasting and arrays, and used Julia to make the generative art on my business cards.

I stopped using Julia a while ago, but it still sometimes comes up. When people ask, I tell them that I can no longer recommend it. I thought I’d write up my reasons why.

My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters.

In my experience, Julia and its packages have the highest rate of serious correctness bugs of any programming system I’ve used, and I started programming with Visual Basic 6 in the mid-2000s.

It might be useful to give some concrete examples.

Here are some correctness issues I filed:

Here are comparable issues filed by others:

I would hit bugs of this severity often enough to make me question the correctness of any moderately complex computation in Julia.

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