Julia 1.6 Highlights

Post by mbauman » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

socialdemocrat wrote: post #156

skohan wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean exactly? Or what is novel here?

The combination. E.g multiple dispatch without JIT would be really slow as you are picking a method to run at runtime based on the type of all the function arguments. That requires a linear search through a list of all possible combinations of input arguments. In a single dispatch language like most object oriented languages, you can do a simple dictionary/hash table lookup. Much faster. With the JIT Julia is able th…

Post by dunefox » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #190

sieste wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, this is a game changer. Previously time to first plot (TTFP) was >1 minute for me, which made julia completely unusable for my day-to-day exploratory data analysis, visualisation, quick random number experiments etc. Now TTFP is less than 10 seconds. I'm now ready (and excited) to jump ship from R and python!

That was also a huge problem for me. I sometimes open Stata/R/Python/Excel, run a few snippets, and I'm done. All four take seconds to start (or even less), and Julia felt like a huge step back in productivity. If it's really fixed, might be good trying again.

       _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
      (_)     | (_) (_)    |
       _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
      | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
      | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.6.0 (2021-03-24)
     _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
    |__/                   |
    
    (@v1.6) pkg> add Plots
        Updating registry at `~/.julia/registries/General`
        Updating git-repo `https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General.git`
       Resolving package versions...
       Installed Qt_jll ─ v5.15.2+3
      Downloaded artifact: Qt
        Updating `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml`
      [91a5bcdd] + Plots v1.11.0
        Updating `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Manifest.toml`
      [ede63266] ↑ Qt_jll v5.15.2+2 ⇒ v5.15.2+3
      Progress [========================================>]  246/246
    246 dependencies successfully precompiled in 140 seconds
    
    julia> @time using Plots
      3.689727 seconds (6.58 M allocations: 472.965 MiB, 7.49% gc time, 0.13% compilation time)
    
    julia> @time begin
           using Plots
           x = 1:10; y = rand(10); # These are the plotting data
           plot(x, y)
           end
      3.050765 seconds (3.63 M allocations: 218.824 MiB, 4.87% gc time, 59.07% compilation time)
    
    julia> @time begin
           using Plots
           x = 1:10; y = rand(10); # These are the plotting data
           plot(x, y)
           end
      0.001435 seconds (2.61 k allocations: 161.836 KiB)

Post by yellowcake0 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

neolog wrote: post #162

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I wrote that I was under the impression that the brainfuck interpreter implementations were the only benchmarks in the repo. There are, however (I now realize), also benchmarks for base64 decoding, JSON parsing, and writing your own matmul (rather than calling a BLAS matmul, which is not generally recommended), so this is more reasonable than I thought but still a somewhat odd collection of tasks to benchmark. O…

I'm a daily Julia user but tbh I've gotta agree with parent commenter. I think Jeff's attitude in the "What's bad about Julia" talk is the right way to handle criticism: listen to the person, ask about their use cases, understand how Julia could be improved for that user. Accepting criticism makes a good product, and seeing project leaders do it makes a good impression.

Post by DreamScatter » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #116

siproprio wrote: post #107

On 1.6, I tried "] add Plots" and julia got stuck.

Please file an issue describing the situation: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/new

Post by eigenspace » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #171

cbkeller wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, I think there might be an argument to be made that Julia is to multiple dispatch (or multiple dispatch + JAOT) as the iPhone is to “touchscreen computers that can make phone calls”. It’s not that it’s the first, but it seems to be the first where the use of multiple dispatch throughout the community was sufficiently pervasive to kick-start the emergence of the strong network effects we’re now seeing…

Except everyone is forgetting that I also mentioned Dylan, from Apple, and whose goal was to be a system programming language for the Newton OS, with the Dylan team winning over the C++ one, but internal politics made the decision to go with the outcome of the C++ team alongside NewtonScript.