Though it's designed as a scientific language, their goals of having C-like speed and yet Ruby-like beauty make it the perfect target for such a project.
The idea of a dynamic Ruby-like language with C-like performance reminds me of Avi Bryant's talk "Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal" : http://vimeo.com/4763707
He explains that dynamic languages are not inherently slow. It's their current implementation that's slow. Java is not fast thanks to static typing, it is fast thanks to the Hotspot VM, which builds upon the StrongTalk VM implementation.
Quote taken around the 13" mark (some trolling included ;) ): "Ruby has the dynamic part, and Java has the fast part. And this has led to this assumption that people have that the reason that Java is fast and Ruby is slow is because Java is static and Ruby is dynamic. And that's just not true, that's just a myth. Nothing about Java being fast has anything to do with it being static. It's simply that the papers that the Java people read were the ones that told you how to make it fast, and the papers that Matz read were the ones that told you how to make it usable."
What do you have in mind? A microframework, like Flask or Sinatra? I like that idea. I'd have to real dive into the internal of something like Werkzeug before trying to help out. But the Julia language itself looks fairly straightforward.
I just finished up building a microblogging framework using Flask, and I'd love to do the same with a lean MVC framework in Julia, particularly if you achieve anything close to C-like performance.
Exactly what I was thinking.. something small and light, but elegant (very much like Julia itself!). I have little experience in this area and have only built the most lightweight frameworks for myself, but if we start a git repo I'll be the first to dive in and start poking around. I think it would be a really cool project.
Please let me know if you put up a git repo. I can't promise that I'll be able to make any significant contributions at this point in time (working on big project for the next few weeks), but I'd love to try to help when I do get some free time.
By the way, have you seen brubeck: http://brubeck.io/ It would be interesting to build this framework on top of Mongrel 2. Not saying we should necessarily try. But it could be fast, fast, fast.
Have you considered building it on top of go? Or is it more of a "Julia seems cool I wonder if it's good for this" type idea? Just wondering, because I'm thinking of doing the same thing once I get familiar with the golang environment.
I'm interested, but no idea how much help I'll be :-) Feel free to ping me and would love to try and help, as I've been wanting some context to learn and play with Julia since finding out about it, and being able to do web work in it would be great. Be nice to learn something about web frameworks design and whatnot at the same time!
Count me as interested. And be warned, i have less than an hour of experience with julia though. please post the repo link once you flesh out the basics.
Though it's designed as a scientific language, their goals of having C-like speed and yet Ruby-like beauty make it the perfect target for such a project.
Anyone else interested in trying it out with me?