I'm curious if Julia's multiple dispatch could work naturally for server-side web development. In many content management problems, you often run into pages that are parameterized in multiple ways: the kind of data object being viewed, role based permission, and display capabilities, among others. In object oriented systems this often leads to double dispatch in one way or another. With Julia, it may instead result with an "just ahead of time" compile for each permutation; once that's done, page rendering should be snappy. One could use PackageCompiler to build an image with commonly needed permutations so that each computational unit's startup time is reasonable. During development, Revise.jl provides incremental updates to pages affected via code dependency graph.
> With Julia, it may instead result with an "ahead of time" compile for each permutation;
This would be an odd approach, just have the first person who hits a new combination of function and type pay a few ms of compile time. That should work fine.
Oh dear. I meant to write "just ahead of time" (I corrected the post above). This is the Julia community's take on "just in time", but taking into account that there isn't an interpreted fallback. Exactly when a new type specialization is used, it is compiled then and there.
