[ViralBShah]

The Julia compilation model is fairly complex, due to the Julia user's wish for dynamic capabilities combined with common features in statically typed languages.

Although it may appear so, it was not low hanging fruit - it took a lot of effort building incrementally over several releases by a number of contributors.

[snicker7]

In retrospect, how essential was it that Julia went the dynamic route in the first place (as opposed to taking a Haskell-like approach to inferred static typing)?

[adgjlsfhk1]

It's a pretty major difference. Julia lets you write code that the type system doesn't understand, while in a static functional languages you generally have to explain a decent portion of category theory before someone can start writing code that passes around functions. (For a simple example, what is the type of `+`, and does that type allow you to make Int+Float=Float?)