Thank you all very much for your answers, they have been extremely helpful!
In summary, it seems like there is a fairly clear answer to all but one question, which is the question about Julia's memory usage. I am still puzzled by what it is actually being used for. For comparison, if I start a python interpreter it uses less than 5MB of RAM. I expected Julia's code generation to consume more memory than an interpreter, but I did not expect it to be anywhere near that much. I suppose the issue with Tuple/immutable type performance also isn't *completely* clear. Andy, would you be willing to collect the responses you found helpful and add them to the FAQ? https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/doc/manual/faq.rst You can just click "edit" on that page, no need to explicitly deal with git. I've been keeping track of many questions that I have found answers to (not just those answered here), and I've been writing it all up in a desktop wiki. I'm not sure what would be best to add to the FAQ at this point, but I am hoping to work out a good format for sharing my experiences soon. Either by contributing to the FAQ, by writing a blog post, or both.
