What Stefan said in his Quora post largely still holds, except that 0.3.4 is the latest version to use now. :-)
Production means different things for different people. I personally feel it is almost as good as environments like Matlab/Octave/Python+Numpy+SciPy for scientific usage. For users of R, comparable capabilities in Julia are still some ways away. If production means powering a website, where certain mathematical parts are done in Julia, and communicate over ZeroMQ with something else - the current state of affairs is good enough to take the plunge. See for example, a talk on a similar matter by Avik Sengupta in JuliaCon 2014, where he talks about using Julia in Production, or Michael's talk. Avik - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ8-_Q67-2U Michael - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV39IkeMCSY If you are talking about a large financial enterprise application, with regulation, audits, etc., then one has to tread more carefully. We expect to reach 1.0 in early 2016 - maybe another couple of releases away. That said, I know of one use case where someone is pushing the use of julia, but one has to be willing to invest the time to stay on top of things. I personally would not venture in such an area without a support contract with someone who is willing to cover the various risks. This is not the first time such a question has come up. In fact, this is exactly why we formed Julia Computing LLC (sorry - no website yet), to meet this demand from julia users. In an earlier life, Alan, Jeff, and I were part of the team that built Star-P - a parallel Matlab compiler and runtime - and it took the transition from academia to a company to make it bullet proof, with the kind of testing, documentation and organization structure that would be needed to support commercial usage. While Star-P was not open source, Julia is and will continue to be open source. But, I believe that a company that works with customers using Julia in their businesses will be able to make investments towards making it ready for the enterprise. -viral On Thursday, January 1, 2015 11:43:24 AM UTC+5:30, Eric Forgy wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > Happy New Year! > > I briefly introduced myself and what I'm trying to do here > <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/julia-users/Forgy/julia-users/umHiBwVLQ4g/P6DoT7qGrB8J> > . > > I saw that Stefan gave a nice answer to the question "Is Julia ready for > production use? <https://www.quora.com/Is-Julia-ready-for-production-use>" > over on Quora. However, being ready for production is one thing and being > ready for use in an enterprise application for large conservative financial > institutions that undergo audits by regulators, etc., might be another. > > A comment in this group was made yesterday,"Julia is from and for > researchers. > <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/GyH8nhExY9I/_mLCNVFOcKMJ>" I > notice there are quite a number of researchers developing Julia, but > naturally there is a much smaller team of core developers that seem to work > very well together. If this small team disintegrated for some reason, e.g. > find jobs, etc., I'm not sure Julia would have the escape velocity to > develop into a mature enough language for the kind of applications I have > in mind. > > I am bootstrapping a startup so I need to be careful how I allocate my > time and resources. I don't mind being a little cutting edge, but I would > have to consider the likelihood that Julia reaches at least a "first > version" 1.0. > > So can I ask for some honest advice? With the obvious caveats understood, > how far away is a "1.0"? How long can the core team continue its dedication > to the development of Julia? Will Julia remain "from and for researchers" > indefinitely? Can you envision Julia being used in large enterprise > financial applications? > > Thank you for any words of wisdom. > > Best regards, > Eric >
