Dear Julia users: my colleagues and I are planning on writing cross-platform (Linux variants, OS X, Windows) commercial software for the research community, preferably in Julia. Our projected release date will be some time in the next 3-4 years. It is crucial to user-friendliness and protection of intellectual property that Julia supports (and documents) its compilation to stand-alone processor-native code. If that code depends on shared-libraries, it should be possible to install these together with the distributed application without incurring licensing issues in a commercial context. Further, it will be necessary to develop full-featured GUIs with interactive 3D plotting features such as patch with full alpha transparency. Of course it is imperative that such implementations be easy to interface with and stable enough for commercial deployment.
The question we are left with: will Julia be ready in 3-4 years? If we use Julia, will we be faced with having to debug Julia packages instead of our own code? Will the end-user ever notice that we have used Julia for development? We have heard that C, Fortran can be called easily in Julia, i.e., we should be able to call solver such as PARDISO without issue? This will be crucial, as our problems rely on the solution of large, unsymmetric, and possibly indefinite systems. Of course, we needn't have every feature imaginable by man, and we will be happy to contribute to the Julia project if anything exotic should arise. Regards, Robert + coworkers
