We first survey some development regarding the study of holomorphic functions on manifolds. We insist mostly on Liouville theorems or, more generally, dimension estimates for the space of polynomially growing holomorphic functions. Then we present some recent joint work with Jiaping Wang on this topic. Our work is motivated by the study of Ricci solitons in the theory of Ricci flow. However, the most general results we have do not require any knowledge of curvature.