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Crushing Julia's TTFP: Custom Sysimages with PackageCompiler.jl

  If you are coming from Python or R, Julia's runtime performance is intoxicating, but its startup latency is sobering. The "Time-to-First-Plot" (TTFP) is the most notorious offender. You write a CLI script to process a CSV and generate a chart, but the user spends 15 seconds waiting for   using Plots   and the first   plot()   call to complete before anything actually happens. While Julia 1.9+ introduced native code caching which significantly improved package load times, heavy workflows (especially those involving  Plots.jl ,  DataFrames.jl , or  DifferentialEquations.jl ) still suffer from noticeable compilation lag. For CLI tools and repetitive scripting tasks, this latency is unacceptable. The solution is  PackageCompiler.jl . The Root Cause: Just-In-Time Compilation To fix TTFP, you must understand why it exists. Julia is a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled language. When you run a script, the following happens: Parsing:  Code is convert...