It has been often noted that Julia has no built-in graphics command. This means that it is not possible to create some datasets and issue a plot command without first installing and loading a package.

One reason for this is that Julia needs to build from source a variety of different operating systems and any libraries that are shipped, such as OpenBLAS and LibUV, must as be in source form and not interfere with the building process.

Graphics engines have a variety of different backends such as Gtk, Qt; and, whereas specialist packages may be restricted in their OS support, the overall Julia system may not.

At first, the inclusion of built-in graphics was seen as a long term goal and one that would be added in future releases. However with an emphasis on package compilation and rapid loading, this does not seem as pressing as it originally did. I will return to this topic at the end of this chapter.

One additional point to notice is that the Julia method of importing symbols...