Happy to address these points:<p><pre><code>  - Startup performance&#x2F;memory usage
</code></pre>
Yes, we are definitely very acutely aware of these. Julia is not currently optimized for frequently run short scripts. That&#x27;s the price on pays for having to bring up the entire runtime system (initializing the compiler, RNG, external libraries etc). The good news is that there will be a solution to this soon, which is to statically compile your julia program. The area where this really comes up for most people using is package load times. We&#x27;re very actively working on making that faster.<p><pre><code>  - Syntax
</code></pre>
A little subjective, so not sure how much I can say here. I can say that I&#x27;m not a huge fan of our multi-line comment syntax. It&#x27;s not entirely clear what a better syntax would be though (the original issue on this had some suggestions, but some of them were worse).<p><pre><code>  - One-based indexing
</code></pre>
I think there has been plenty said on this topic, though interestingly this is one of the only times I&#x27;ve seen the argument made in a way that I actually agree with. That said, I do think there is an easy way to deal with this though. For packages that needs arrays of indices, it would be quite easy to define an `IndexArray` type that does the translation automatically.<p><pre><code>  - String Formatting
</code></pre>
Yep, you&#x27;re right, it&#x27;s a mess. It&#x27;ll have to be cleaned up.<p><pre><code>  - Unsafe C Interface
</code></pre>
There&#x27;s two projects (Clang.jl and Cxx.jl) which can help with this. The former automatically generates ccall definitions for you, the latter just parses the header and generates the call directly.<p><pre><code>  - Slowing down in development
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m really not sure where that impression comes from. Perhaps it is that we&#x27;re adding fewer features, but rather working on cleaning up existing features. Also, I personally at least have been doing a lot of work outside
of base (particularly on the debugger). Not sure. Would love to know.