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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?

#31

Post by eigenspace »

kitsune_ wrote: post #17

It takes 180s to import Statistics, PlutoUI, Images and OffsetArrays in Pluto on this Macbook Pro with 32GB that is a couple of years old, while the fans are going crazy. If I'm unlucky a worker process will seg fault. All in all the interactive / REPL part (even with stuff like Revise) is kind of a let down thanks to the slow precompilation / lack of caching? I like it, but I really don't see how it is ever going to…

I assume that's including precompilation, otherwise something is seriously wrong with your computer. Precompilation can take a while, but it's cached between sessions, so it should be much faster the second time.

Also, in version 1.6, we have multithreaded precompilation which happens at installation time instead of when you first try to load the package. This makes it much faster.

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

#32

Post by Sukera »

saiojd wrote: post #26
Sukera wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important part about the releases since 1.0 is that compile time has been significantly reduced, the article touches on basically all ways how this has been done - may I ask when you've last tried it?

A few months ago. First time to plot is noticeably better than it was a few versions ago, but still extremely slow compared to Python. The article gives a benchmark of 9 seconds. I mean, come on. The main problem I had was simply that what any time I needed to modify a struct field, or anytime my program crashed, or any time the buggy IDE extension crashed, I needed to recompile everything. I also haven't found anyon…

I know that there are plans to cache even more, but other than that I can basically only recommend to put distinct projects into proper projects (with a module and Project.toml). That will already cache precompiled code for that module, even between sessions. Having things in a script won't have that benefit. For experimenting with struct layouts, I've found that NamedTuples (https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/base/#Core.NamedTuple) are amazing for prototyping, since they can be accessed via A.b just like structs but don't have the limitation of being const global.

The dynamism and flexibility combined with the compilation model is basically what leads down this path of recompilation, unfortunately. Since importing packages may change behaviour/invalidate some compiled method (that's what the SnoopCompile stuff in the article was about), it's nontrivial to just begin caching things left and right. You'd end up with an exponential explosion in the number of methods to cache, wasting huge amounts of disk space. That's not to say that there aren't more things that could be done, just that it's hard to do so.

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

#33

Post by thebooktocome »

rightbyte wrote: post #27
cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What boggles my mind is that a language oriented to scientific programming has such a lousy time to first plot. I know it has been improving, it is still not acceptable. Not for me as a user, not acceptable for a language who wants to become mainstream.

The plot is also very simple. No zoom, brush, save to file, label, title, regression etc that you need to process it in a GUI and save for a report. I would really like to use Julia as a "Matlab or Octave but with nice string concatenation" but the UI is just lacking for one off calculations and data processing.

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.

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

#34

Post by DNF2 »

saiojd wrote: post #26
Sukera wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important part about the releases since 1.0 is that compile time has been significantly reduced, the article touches on basically all ways how this has been done - may I ask when you've last tried it?

A few months ago. First time to plot is noticeably better than it was a few versions ago, but still extremely slow compared to Python. The article gives a benchmark of 9 seconds. I mean, come on. The main problem I had was simply that what any time I needed to modify a struct field, or anytime my program crashed, or any time the buggy IDE extension crashed, I needed to recompile everything. I also haven't found anyon…

No one interested in interfaces? My impression is that interfaces is very commonly discussed, and is one of the most anticipated features in the language, though it may not come until v2.0.

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

#35

Post by linspace »

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 several reasons like modularity, package management and performance. But these are things that require at least 10 hours of use (to say something) instead of 10 minutes. With so many languages promising enlightent and transcendence to a next power level you cannot expect people to make that kind of investment.

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

#36

Post by Sukera »

rightbyte wrote: post #27
cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What boggles my mind is that a language oriented to scientific programming has such a lousy time to first plot. I know it has been improving, it is still not acceptable. Not for me as a user, not acceptable for a language who wants to become mainstream.

The plot is also very simple. No zoom, brush, save to file, label, title, regression etc that you need to process it in a GUI and save for a report. I would really like to use Julia as a "Matlab or Octave but with nice string concatenation" but the UI is just lacking for one off calculations and data processing.

I'm afraid I don't understand your comment - both Plots.jl as well as Makie.jl (the two most commonly used plotting packages, as far as I know) support all of those things. Makie.jl does so natively, Plots.jl does so if the backend (e.g. Plotly, PyPlot) supports interactivity (the rest is available by default). Do you mind giving an example, such that this could be improved further?

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

#37

Post by simias »

oblio wrote: post #15
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.

That won't stop these people. It's the same discussion as the interpreted languages vs compiled languages or the editor flame wars. On one hand you have people that say "thinking takes a lot longer than waiting a bit for compilation or actually editing source code" (I'm in this camp) and people that go "I don't want to wait for compilation and I want my editing to be hyper-efficient even if I have to invest hundreds…

I don't know how Julia fares but personally what bothers me with long compile times is when I can't context switch, waiting for the compiler's output.

What I mean in practice is that if you take Rust for instance, the compile times can be fairly long but the type checking occurs early on and is quite fast. Therefore once I know that this step succeeded I can usually let the compilation continue in the background while I focus my attention elsewhere.

If on the other hand if I need to wait a lot longer to confirm that my code is actually valid I find myself just staring at the output window, not willing to let go of my short term memory until I get a confirmation that my code was accepted.

The problem is not adding 20s to your overall dev time, it's to have a 20s interruption while you're "in the zone".

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

#38

Post by oxinabox »

thebooktocome wrote: post #33
rightbyte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plot is also very simple. No zoom, brush, save to file, label, title, regression etc that you need to process it in a GUI and save for a report. I would really like to use Julia as a "Matlab or Octave but with nice string concatenation" but the UI is just lacking for one off calculations and data processing.

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.

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

#39

Post by eigenspace »

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…

Makie.jl [1] does it's plotting on the GPU (like a video game engine), so can handle millions of datapoints just fine.

Also, note that for people to whom plotting is really important, it's quite easy nowadays to just AOT compile your plotting library to your sysimage with PackageCompiler.jl [2] for instant plots.

[1] https://github.com/JuliaPlots/Makie.jl

[2] https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

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

#40

Post by systemvoltage »

oscardssmith wrote: post #25
cambalache wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What boggles my mind is that a language oriented to scientific programming has such a lousy time to first plot. I know it has been improving, it is still not acceptable. Not for me as a user, not acceptable for a language who wants to become mainstream.

It's a better time to first plot than matlab, which is one of the other major contenders. On my computer it is about 3 seconds, which is noticable, but far from disqualifing.

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.

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