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Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

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Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#11

Post by logankilpatrick »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #7
leephillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the most obvious improvements for most users are the big growth in the package ecosystem, with some science and math packages becoming the best available in any language (DifferentialEquations.jl, for example) and the drastic improvement in interactivity: the REPL starts instantly now, and most packages compile much faster. This will get even better in the next major release.

I’m curious (I’m planning on designing an ODE/PDE package relatively soon), what makes DifferentialEquations.jl the best available?

The fact that Chris R and the whole SciML ecosystem are using / building on it. Lots of resources going into it and usage in real world places like Pfizer and Moderna.

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#12

Post by logankilpatrick »

vHMtsdf wrote: post #10

I heard a talk from a large cybersecurity company that was using Julia for research and is apparently in the process of dropping Julia due to: - difficulty in hiring, apparently it was too expensive/difficult to hire Julia programmers, - poorly performing garbage collector. If I recall correctly, they had issues when trying to process huge amounts of data. Seems like small teams will not run into these issues at leas…

Please put them in touch with me if possible. RelationalAI has similar GC issues which they are the core Julia developers are working hard to resolve.

I have also seen zero postings for Julia roles in cyber security companies so it is likely that they aren't tapping into the community which is why they can't find people.

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#14

Post by leephillips »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #7
leephillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the most obvious improvements for most users are the big growth in the package ecosystem, with some science and math packages becoming the best available in any language (DifferentialEquations.jl, for example) and the drastic improvement in interactivity: the REPL starts instantly now, and most packages compile much faster. This will get even better in the next major release.

I’m curious (I’m planning on designing an ODE/PDE package relatively soon), what makes DifferentialEquations.jl the best available?

This lists some of its unique abilities:

https://docs.sciml.ai/DiffEqDocs/stable/

The routines are sufficiently generic, with regard to Julia’s type system, to allow the solvers to automatically compose with other packages and to seamlessly use types other than Numbers. For example, instead of handling just functions Number→Number, you can define your ODE in terms of quantities with physical dimensions, uncertainties, quaternions, etc., and it will just work (for example, propagating uncertainties correctly to the solution¹). Recent developments involve research into the automated selection of solution routines based on the properties of the ODE, something that seems really next-level to me.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/834571/

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#15

Post by thetwentyone »

ubj wrote: post #2

If anyone from these startups is here on HN, I would love to hear your thoughts on the following: 1. How are you dealing with TTFX when deploying your code? If using PackageCompiler/StaticCompiler, is binary size an issue? 2. Are you using solely Julia, or a combination of Julia + other languages? 3. What unique value is Julia offering your startup that is difficult to find in other languages?

Jumping the gun slightly, but TTFX likely about to get a lot better (5x+ improvement in times) in the next version (1.9). Via cachine of the native compiled code.

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/47184#issuecomment-1...

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#16

Post by DougBTX »

dartharva wrote: post #13

How good is Julia as a general-purpose language? Can it be a viable replacement for, say, Lua in game development?

Julia is a very nice language, its core abstractions (mutli-dispatch and macros) are not tied to any particular use-case. My overriding feeling using it is that it is a language visiting from the future, it is very well put together. Having said that, I've not had the opportunity to use it in production, Python is very popular!

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#17

Post by etik »

ubj wrote: post #2

If anyone from these startups is here on HN, I would love to hear your thoughts on the following: 1. How are you dealing with TTFX when deploying your code? If using PackageCompiler/StaticCompiler, is binary size an issue? 2. Are you using solely Julia, or a combination of Julia + other languages? 3. What unique value is Julia offering your startup that is difficult to find in other languages?

We (metalenz.com) use Julia extensively in our optical design/simulation/modeling workflows:

1. Design team keeps live sessions during interactive work, otherwise launches on virtualized servers (and things take sufficiently long to compute TTFX is a rounding error)

2. Above mentioned team is exclusively Julia. Julia shows up in other things we do (low-level computer vision), but not dominant nor exclusive

3. High performance & expressive programming and flexible autodiff system for scientific computation

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#18

Post by affinepplan »

dartharva wrote: post #13

How good is Julia as a general-purpose language? Can it be a viable replacement for, say, Lua in game development?

It is a very well-designed language for many (although of course not all) applications. Most of the ecosystem revolves around scientific computing so you may find there is a bit of a learning curve / sparse existing libraries if you want to use it for game development.

Also, on the language side, Julia is optimized for total throughput, which means even though it is easy to write extremely fast code, it sometimes suffers latency issues during stop-the-world garbage collection or JIT compilation. Julia gives the experienced developer tools to avoid this, but especially for those less practiced with the language it could potentially be an obstacle for real-time games like FPS--of course if you are developing a turn-based game this is less of a concern.

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#19

Post by maria2 »

dartharva wrote: post #13

How good is Julia as a general-purpose language? Can it be a viable replacement for, say, Lua in game development?

Isn't Lua's main benefit that it has a small runtime that can be executed inside the context of a large C/C++ executable? Julia has support for C FFI, but it looks like you'd have to manually wrap all of your native code in Julia wrappers.

One library I've really liked for this use case is QuickJS. It's a super small ES2020 implementation written in C. It has a great API that lets you bind native C functions and types into JavaScript functions, objects, and classes. This lets you bind native C code that gets used naturally in JavaScript without needing to write wrappers.

Re: Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

#20

Post by cbkeller »

open-source-ux wrote: post #8

Julia scientific apps and libraries continue to grow and see momentum. Is there interest in Julia outside the scientifc sphere? I'd be interested to hear of non-scientific projects implemented in Julia (for example, business apps or web-related projects.) Related: I think Julia is an excellent starting language (compared to Python). Is anyone teaching Julia to new programmers with success?

I'm teaching an intro programming course (discipline-specific, for Earth sciences) in Julia at Dartmouth. So far so good I think -- but definitely on the sciences side of things.
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