I'm using 1.5.3. Gonna update to 1.6 and see what happens.
EDIT: just running it on julia's "master" branch (v1.7.0-DEV), the initialization seems to be slower, but then the cells run maybe marginally faster. Looks good, but I could not push this to my students yet...
I wouldn't recommend master to anyone but the experts in julia. 1.6 is pretty stable though. Do remember that in Julia second execution of an instruction is much faster than the first. Thus, it may take some time to initialize, but after that it will run smoothly.
But yes, my tolerance towards this is higher as I am used to matlab.
> my tolerance towards this is higher as I am used to matlab.
You may like octave for that (my daily runner, that I want to replace with julia in the future). It recognizes the same language as matlab; but it is free software and, crucially, the startup time is negligible. For example, you can run octave scripts inside a bash loop, as if it was a calculator.
EDIT: just running it on julia's "master" branch (v1.7.0-DEV), the initialization seems to be slower, but then the cells run maybe marginally faster. Looks good, but I could not push this to my students yet...