It has improved gradually. The community is targeting latency optimizations in the entire ecosystem, and that effort has been moving rapidly.

Plots is still a problem for me. Rust and Julia have a lot in common in this respect, but I will gladly take the advantages of their package management systems if it means a longer compilation time.

I don't see how it can while their "load a module" step involved compiling it from C++ source. Although I guess that doesn't explain why it is still so slow the subsequent times.

Can you elaborate? How does loading a Julia module involve compiling c++?

The module gets compiled from source.

Yes, but not from C++, but from Julia source code. Or what are you referring to?

“Compiling Julia” means lowering into LLVM IR that then gets compiled. It’s not C++ but it takes roughly as long

PackageCompiler.jl helps significantly, but it's still an issue.

TLDR: no. 1.7 is marginally better than 1.6 for startup time, but it's not a massive change.