Once you can compile a julia app- front end, back and probabilistic prog/ML to web assembly and have it run in browser and mobile, it will skyrocket in popularity.
Why? The only current benefit of Julia afaict is the tracing jit. If you run the tracing jit on web assembly then it's giving up most of its performance benefits. And Python could be built on web assembly as well.
But who knows. Weird things seem to become popular despite all the negative points.
Forgive me, it's not a tracing JIT but just LLVM's JIT.
Precompiling in Julia is extremely not-straight-forward. You would think you just use --compile and it would work; but it doesn't at all.
Also, at ~850kb, Python's runtime is not that hefty. It's intended to be embedded and while it's quite a bit larger than lua's 200kb, but smaller than libjulia's 16mb.