Right, It can currently precompile to some extent, but full source-to-binary-blob-compilation is on the roadmap. See here: http://juliacomputing.com/blog/2016/02/09/static-julia.html

Julia's runtime includes its compiler and full huge standard lib, but of which are eventually going to be split off, IIUC.

The former because of static compilation potential and the latter into modules that can be included piecemeal.

Here is an emerging julia alternative http://www.breloff.com/transformations/

Julia is a general purpose language

Julia focuses too much on numerical programming, which makes it great for matlab users, but awkward for other purposes.

In what way?

Actually, they said they would keep programming in python.

Will you continue maintenance on this indefinitely (barring orders from higher up) or is this meant for a one shot translate and dump?

Lead on the project said he would like to support python 3 at some point.

That would be great. But the issue is really what do people do that have all this mass of Python2 source. The Python3 people are off doing what they want to do on that, which I consider the experimental branch. There's just so many new mistakes made with Python3 it's not a slam dunk for people to move to. At this point, it's become more of a social pressure / political thing (2020?) than a logical decision to move to 3. Something like Grumpy is definitely going to take the throne that Python3 abandoned.

What python 3 features are painful and why?

Have you thought about using type hints to help type inference?

Some work on that is discussed here. I would love a dropbox google colab (though also targeting 3.x :) )

https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/1862

Yes, leveraging type hints for optimization purposes is a long term goal. Thanks for pointing me to that issue, I'll keep an eye on it.

One of the goals of open sourcing was to get feedback and work with outside folks so I'm definitely open to collaboration!

Awesome!

What's wrong with Julia? 1.0 should be coming out in a bit less than a year.