Julia backend without the jupyter dependency

[MichaelHatherly]

Description

Hi all,

I've not found a specific open issue that covers this discussion so opening this one. Please point me at one that we can carry on discussion if needed.

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Background: we, PumasAI, are interested in making use of Quarto in reporting and learning resources for our Julia-based workflows. Our current blocker here is the Jupyter backend used for executing Julia code in notebooks. We'd prefer not to need to manage the Python dependencies involved there and instead be able to evaluate Julia code with a plain Julia backend.

We're willing to implement and contribute the required code to the community to support this, as well as long term maintenance of it.

My current questions mainly revolve around how the Quarto team would want to integrate such a feature into the software and whether there has been much discussion/design around this already?

I'm aware of @jjallaire's branch main...feature/pluto-engine that @pankgeorg has pointed us to a couple of weeks ago. Though there may be other efforts that I've not come across yet?