Yes, I tried it upon its release and, while much faster, the startup time is still dramatically sub-par, especially when loading packages. This means that when I call Julia scripts from makefiles, etc., a considerable amount of running time is spent in re-compiling over and over the same packages. I agree that my usage pattern is not at all representative, but still it seems that Julia is not a good "unix citizen", since it tries to force you to do everything inside its own REPL, instead of the native one. This is indeed my main point of friction with Julia. If it started instantaneously it would be essentially perfect. This is not a matter of dividing the startup time by 2, but at least by 200.