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Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

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Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#51

Post by enriquto »

DNF2 wrote: post #46
cmeacham98 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be falling into the same trap you lament in your comment: - The other side is "these people" that "won't stop" - They're striving for "hyper-efficiency" at the cost of "hundreds and thousands of hours" - People who complain about this issue don't (or do significantly less of) reading documentation/code/etc People talk about TTFP because it is a real issue that is off-putting for many programmers that woul…

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

> I cannot fathom how ttfp is important.

I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern.

This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling octave (inside the loop) and then gnuplot (to create the actual graph from the octave computed data points). I would like to replace each call to octave+gnuplot to a single call to julia. Yet, this would make my script run in a few hours instead of a few seconds, because for this usage pattern all plots are first plots

Before you suggest that I should rewrite the whole thing in julia, maybe you are right but

1) it would take me a few weeks that I don't have

2) that's not my point. A good tool is a tool that can be used for purposes that it was not intended to, like this. If the time to first plot in julia was a millisecond instead of 10 seconds, then julia would be a much better tool.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#52

Post by systemvoltage »

eigenspace wrote: post #45
systemvoltage wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julia oversells itself as a general purpose language which I find absolutely out of line. Their marketing needs to be a lot more humble until they figure out the kinks. Also, my guess would be Python and not Matlab as it’s main competitors.

In what way is marketing julia as a general purpose programming language 'way out of line'? People use julia to make webservers, write programming languages, create plotting libraries, do scientific analysis, do compiler research, make video games, do HPC, etc. Julia has a design that's indeed strongly informed by scientific computing, but in order to actually meet the needs of the various people using it for scienti…

Do you think R or Matlab is a general purpopse language? Sure you could do all these things but should you?

Julia is clearly positioned as a scientific computing language. Let's be clear.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#53

Post by walshemj »

DNF2 wrote: post #46
cmeacham98 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be falling into the same trap you lament in your comment: - The other side is "these people" that "won't stop" - They're striving for "hyper-efficiency" at the cost of "hundreds and thousands of hours" - People who complain about this issue don't (or do significantly less of) reading documentation/code/etc People talk about TTFP because it is a real issue that is off-putting for many programmers that woul…

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

Me too not to go all four yorkshire man here, but I can remember when you would have to write your own plotting programs in Fortran and then wait for the pen plotter to slowly draw your plot.

And not that long before that you would print the results out and manually plot them on graph paper.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#54

Post by cbkeller »

enriquto wrote: post #51
DNF2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

> I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern. This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling o…

It’s not trivial to do, but compiling plots into your sysimg might actually fix that

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#55

Post by ForHackernews »

oxinabox wrote: post #38
thebooktocome wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are absolutely labels, titles, and the ability to save figures to files. I used to deliver project reports to customers using a combination of Julia and LaTeX. It was perfectly suitable for that application.

I think they mean no GUI for that. To manually (rather than programatically) do this.

...it's a programming language, not an Excel competitor.

You could use Julia to build some kind of GUI plot-making tool.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#56

Post by enriquto »

cbkeller wrote: post #54
enriquto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern. This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling o…

It’s not trivial to do, but compiling plots into your sysimg might actually fix that

Thanks! Is there a way to compile all installed packages into the sysimage? If so, why isn't that the default?

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#57

Post by cbkeller »

enriquto wrote: post #56
cbkeller wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not trivial to do, but compiling plots into your sysimg might actually fix that

Thanks! Is there a way to compile all installed packages into the sysimage? If so, why isn't that the default?

Technically yes, but then IIRC you’d have to recompile the whole sysimg any time you update any single package, which could get to be a pain. The usual compromise seems to be to include just a handful of your most used packages in the sysimg (say Plots + Revise)

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#58

Post by CyberDildonics »

oxinabox wrote: post #23
the__alchemist wrote: post #20

> Plotting, it turns out, is basically a really hard thing for a compiler. It is many, many, small methods, most of which are only called once. And unlike most Julia code, it doesn’t actually benefit all that much from Julia’s JIT. Julia’s JIT is normally specializing code, and running a ton of optimizations. But plotting itself isn’t in the hot-loop – optimizing the code takes longer than running it the few dozen ti…

> You don't need to compile the plotting library every time. You don't need to but Julia does. Its definately a issue, and I know it is being worked on. Julia doesn't store compiled binary code between sessions. Unless you compile it into a sysimage. There are apparently reasons why caching compiled binary like this is complicated in Julia. But once that is solved, wow things are going to be nice.

> There are apparently reasons why caching compiled binary like this is complicated in Julia. But once that is solved, wow things are going to be nice.

I put a lot of hours into julia five years ago and all the same things were being said. I don't know why the compilation is so slow or why the caching is so bad, but it was the main complaint then and still is. The solutions are all 'just around the corner'. It reminds me of java two decades ago.

Actually most languages that get a lot of use seem to go through this. The big problems for some reason have solutions "just around the corner" but they remain giant problems.

I think what really happens is that people work on what they want. Solving their hard problems is not fun and no one holds anyone's feet to the flames. C++ has had problems with compile time and template errors, but there has been real commercial pressure to making progress on those. Julia's problems are the same as they were half a decade ago. Start working and wait an enormous amount of time for the exact things to compile that you compiled yesterday when you started it up.

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#59

Post by DNF2 »

enriquto wrote: post #51
DNF2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

> I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern. This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling o…

But this is really the worst conceivable use case for Julia. Why are you interested in making this change, when Julia offers no advantage in this scenario?

Re: Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?

#60

Post by stillyslalom »

enriquto wrote: post #51
DNF2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. It's time to first plot, not to every plot. After it's down to ~10 seconds, why on earth does anyone care?

> I cannot fathom how ttfp is important. I personally do care for my concrete usage pattern. This is my use case: A long shell script that does a lot of things. At some point, inside a loop that runs hundreds of times, it needs to solve a couple of small linear systems and plot a simple graph. There's hundreds of png graphs, that are then combined into a video sequence. Right now, the computation is done by calling o…

You may want to look at [DaemonMode.jl](https://github.com/dmolina/DaemonMode.jl), which spins up a persistent Julia process in the background so you don't have to pay the TTFP penalty more than once, even when shell-scripting.
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