I was excited to learn that Julia 0.3 will have a much smaller startup time than 0.2 does. If I understood correctly, the reason Julia was slow to start is that it compiles a large portion of the standard library upon starting and the fix was to precompile the library. I installed the Julia 0.3 prerelease from the PPA and was disappointed to see that it still took 20 seconds to start (on my old and slow-even-when-new netbook). Poking around I found out that the binary packages for Julia 0.3-prerelease do not include the precompiled sys.so library (probably because the precompiled library is strongly dependent on the processor used). Here are my questions:
1. Can I build the sys.so using the Julia binary package or do I have to compile Julia from source to get it? If I can build it using the binary distribution what commands do I use where do I put the resulting file? 2. Is there a plan to address this issue so that binary packages can benefit from the reduced start up time? If so, what is it? 3. Is there any reason Julia doesn't just dump the results of compiling stuff into the users ~/.cache directory like, say, Guile does?
