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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?

#161

Post by gugagore »

systemvoltage wrote: post #73
eigenspace wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing these things in julia is very different from doing these things in R or Matlab. The tooling and ecosystem for non-scientific applications in Julia is growing rapidly and is quite competent. Julia is absolutely a general purpose language. It’s user base skews heavily towards scientific computing, but the demographics and ecosystem are broadening daily.

Having used Julia for 2+ years, I couldn't disagree more. Productionizing Julia code has been a total nightmare. The community library support has been growing but hasn't gone through the wringer. Just because things are improving doesn't provide a meaningful understanding against its competitors. I don't see any reason to use Julia over Go for backend webservers. Rust or C++ for systems programming. And frankly, I p…

You're going from "don't call it a general purpose language" to "be receptive to complaints about its short-comings". There's quite a gap in between.

I know that contributers are receptive about short-comings. And if you frankly prefer other languages, then that's totally fine too.

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

#162

Post by saiojd »

fishmaster wrote: post #89
saiojd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't possibly be serious. As things stand, even just redefining a struct field requires restarting the interpreter, which forces you to wait ~10-30 seconds for everything to compile, over and over again. Maybe you only use Julia for small scripts, and can afford to never restart the interpreter?

> even just redefining a struct field requires restarting the interpreter It really doesn't if you use a module.

I mean, I still need to recompile the module no? Or do you split your project into several small modules to avoid this? (I've avoided this so far as I found the module system a bit tedious tbh, as it requires to explicitly list everything you need to export, as well as manually import stuff from the parent module).

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

#163

Post by jampekka »

gugagore wrote: post #157
jampekka wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just make programs that have an "entry point" (e.g. main() in C or if __name__ == "__main__" in python) and run them off the shell. Oftentimes with some arguments. This is how I interact with most of my programs, and it works fine for my own ones too. I agree that this is probably not for everybody, i.e. if you're not used to the CLI workflow. And admittedly it would be sometimes nice to have e.g. embedded graphics…

> I mostly do the introspection with print, dir and help straight in the code. This means you have to change your code in order to debug it. And you have to know what you're debugging before you change your code. This is really, in my opinion, much less than ideal, because you have to iteratively instrument your code while you figure out what is wrong. It's a cycle of You print out the first suspect thing, then that…

If I'm debugging something I'm writing myself it's usually quite obvious where the problem probably is. With other people's code it takes a bit of digging, but is usually found without a debugger. Just print enough stuff, with interpreted languages this is usually really fast. Something like Javascript's console.log is actually really nice for this (and browsers have hands down best debugging tools anyway).

I'm not sure how REPL helps you out of this. You still have to somehow change the state of the program, but if you "monkeypatch" it using REPL, you now have to keep in your head what the state is.

In the end code is just description of how to bring the program to some state. I like to have that description on file so I don't have to keep it in my head.

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

#164

Post by The_rationalist »

linspace wrote: post #35
klmadfejno wrote: post #3

> People often complain about the “Time To First Plot” (TTFP) in Julia. I personally have never minded it – by the time I am plotting something, I have done minutes of thinking so 20 seconds of compilation is nothing. This amuses me. I hadn't really considered the author's perspective, and now I think it aligns with my take on it pretty well.

It is nevertheless im portant because a simple plot is a nice test if you are considering using a language for scientific computing. Criticism about plotting libraries quality is even more valid. I cannot believe that plotting an scatter plot of a few million points is so slow while AAA videogames render millions of pixels in real time. On the long term? I think Julia is a better language than Python, Matlab or R for…

What does Julia bring over Python Poetry package manager ? https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry What about modularity, concretely?

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

#165

Post by The_rationalist »

enriquto wrote: post #128
DNF2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why are you interested in making this change, when Julia offers no advantage in this scenario? Well I love julia the language. It's the interpreter quirks that I find annoying. If julia had something lean and superfast like luajit it would be incredible!

If only they could switch to graalvm :m

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

#166

Post by oxinabox »

jampekka wrote: post #156
socialdemocrat wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have different style and preferences. I have programmed for over 30 years and I find that REPL based development in Julia beats anything else I have tried in term of productivity, and I have tried a ton of tools, IDEs and languages. But sure it may not fit your particular preference or it may be that you have simply not learned to use it effectively. It takes some time to work effectively in a REPL style. It t…

It probably depends also on what you program. If the task is simple enough and doesn't need much revisiting, REPL is probably fine. But OTOH, just writing the code for a simple case and running it isn't too bad either. How do you persist and document your code with REPL-development? Do you log the commands to some separate file? How do you recreate the REPL state if it crashes or you have to reboot? How do you make s…

Generally I am copy-pasting code out of a WIP package to test out an idea as I go. So the code is already being written in a file. Or I am using Juno/VS-Code/Vim-Slime to simplify the copy-paste.

Other times I have the package I am editing loaded with Revise.jl active and I am calling in and trying out the methods I am concurrently writing in my text editor.

It's more like TDD than anything else. It's got that same quick back and for of run, write, run write. But a but more interactive. (Note I am not saying that is TDD -- it isn't -- tests are not nesc written or saved. Though I do often use this while doing TDD to run a test I have written)

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

#167

Post by oxinabox »

saiojd wrote: post #160
oxinabox wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Structs most definitely will be faster. I am not 100% sure this is true. Structs will definately look cleaner in the code. Not sure they will be faster though.

Do you know what the differences end up being when it comes to compilation? (not a rhetorical question - I'd like to know)

Run `@code_typed` and `@code_llvm` and find out?

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

#168

Post by orbifold »

eigenspace wrote: post #94
jampekka wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't use REPL (and for many good reasons you shouldn't) or some other such horror, every plot is the first plot. And it's pain. And not just plots really. Doing anything in Julia is pain if you try to use it as a programming language instead of an app for buggy, unreproducible and misunderstood ad-hoc analyses. Seeing these answers makes me think Julia will never be fixed. I forecast Julia will be back in a n…

> (and for many good reasons you shouldn't) Could you elaborate on this? I'd say repl based interactive programming is one of julia's greatest strengths, and avoiding the repl is probably setting yourself up for pain. That said, if you do find yourself running lots of scripts and paying this penalty all the time, I'd suggest https://github.com/dmolina/DaemonMode.jl as a great way around these pains.

I and probably many others intend to develop reproducible figures. The way to do that in python / matlab is to have a script which loads data from disk and then produces a figure (a png / pdf). You then execute that file many times each time tweaking one aspect of the figure. Julia makes that workflow almost impossibly slow.

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

#169

Post by calebwinston »

celrod wrote: post #97

> (* Technically not all mutable objects live on the heap, because some never live at all, as they are optimized away so are never allocated in the first place.) The compiler will often stack allocate mutable objects in Julia. This is not the same as "never existed in the first place", because the stack pointer gets incremented and underlying data layout is you load from it is the same as that of the mutable object y…

If they are optimized away, are their destructors/finalizers still called? I'm really hoping the answer is yes...

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

#170

Post by krastanov »

The_rationalist wrote: post #164
linspace wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nevertheless im portant because a simple plot is a nice test if you are considering using a language for scientific computing. Criticism about plotting libraries quality is even more valid. I cannot believe that plotting an scatter plot of a few million points is so slow while AAA videogames render millions of pixels in real time. On the long term? I think Julia is a better language than Python, Matlab or R for…

What does Julia bring over Python Poetry package manager ? https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry What about modularity, concretely?

Julia's model is based around multimethods, which enables pretty crazy levels of interoperability (imagine being able to use scipy and tensorflow together, with tensorflow's autograd just magically working on most of scipy's functions). More about it here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kc9HwsxE1OY
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