Introduction

This part of the documentation contains a set of tutorials aimed to teach how PackageCompiler works internally. This is done by going through some examples of manually creating sysimages and apps, mostly from the command line. By knowing the internals of PackageCompiler you can more easily figure out root causes of problems and help others. The inner functionality of PackageCompiler is actually quite simple. There are a few julia commands and compiler invocations that everything is built around, the rest is mostly scaffolding.

Part 1 focuses on how to build a local system image to reduce package load times and reduce the latency that can occur when calling a function for the first time. Part 2 targets how to build an executable based on the custom sysimage so that it can be run without having to explicitly start a Julia session. Part 3 details how to bundle that executable together with the Julia libraries and other files needed so that the bundle can be sent to and run on a different system where Julia might not be installed. These functionalities are exposed from PackageCompiler as create_sysimage and create_app.

It should be noted that there is some usage of non-documented Julia functions and flags. They have not been changed for quite a long time (and are unlikely to change too much in the future), but some care should be taken.