This has been said many times, but I think it is because of not having AOT compilation as an option. Due to this, not only do we have the "Time to first plot" problem, but apparently the memory used by the process is also large. I love Julia and use it for my data and computational work. But for CLI apps and for web apps I am learning Rust because the start up speed and memory usage for CLI and webapps matters.
In Julia 1.9 and beyond, this process now also becomes modular with a native library being produced per package.
The difficulty is determining what exactly must be compiled since Julia's methods are polymorphic. There's are tools that exist to help with this. One of the latest that is SnoopPrecompile.jl.
