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Julia 0.5 Highlights

julialang.org

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Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#51

Post by gabrielgoh »

christophilus wrote: post #2

I'm curious to hear from people who are using Julia on a regular basis. What's the UX like? I only looked at it briefly and was turned off by some things (1-based indexing comes to mind). But I really liked other things (multiple dispatch).

The 1-based indexing is a smaller deal than people make it out to be. If you're doing scientific computing, it's very unlikely you'll be doing too many fidgety things with indexes anyway. I switch between Julia and numpy with ease.

The REPL is on par with ipython (perhaps even better). Also are some IDEs for it but they aren't quite there yet.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#52

Post by kibwen »

Congratulations! As a Rust user, I'm always happy to see new programming languages break into the field. :) However I am confused by this paragraph:

  > Julia’s LLVM version was upgraded from 3.3 to 3.7.1. 
  > [...] we’re very happy to be back to using current 
  > versions of our favorite compiler framework.
LLVM's current version is 3.9, is this a typo or are there problems that prevent Julia from being used with any release newer than 3.7.1?

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#54

Post by KenoFischer »

kibwen wrote: post #52

Congratulations! As a Rust user, I'm always happy to see new programming languages break into the field. :) However I am confused by this paragraph: > Julia’s LLVM version was upgraded from 3.3 to 3.7.1. > [...] we’re very happy to be back to using current > versions of our favorite compiler framework. LLVM's current version is 3.9, is this a typo or are there problems that prevent Julia from being used with any rele…

LLVM 3.7.1 is a little less than 10 months old. Our RC period lasts for about 3 months, the start of which is the last point we'd have possibly upgraded LLVM. Upgrading LLVM is a little bit of a scary prospect for us since we find new bugs in every version (and fix them!), so though we considered moving to 3.8, 3.7 had been stable for a few months, so we didn't want to risk it. There's currently a PR to bump LLVM to 3.9 for 0.6, so I'd expect 0.6 to be released with LLVM 3.9.1.

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#56

Post by kibwen »

KenoFischer wrote: post #54
kibwen wrote: post #52

Congratulations! As a Rust user, I'm always happy to see new programming languages break into the field. :) However I am confused by this paragraph: > Julia’s LLVM version was upgraded from 3.3 to 3.7.1. > [...] we’re very happy to be back to using current > versions of our favorite compiler framework. LLVM's current version is 3.9, is this a typo or are there problems that prevent Julia from being used with any rele…

LLVM 3.7.1 is a little less than 10 months old. Our RC period lasts for about 3 months, the start of which is the last point we'd have possibly upgraded LLVM. Upgrading LLVM is a little bit of a scary prospect for us since we find new bugs in every version (and fix them!), so though we considered moving to 3.8, 3.7 had been stable for a few months, so we didn't want to risk it. There's currently a PR to bump LLVM to…

Cool, mostly I was curious if the show-stopping issues you were seeing were actually fixed for good or whether 3.7.1 just happened to "accidentally" work. :)

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#57

Post by KenoFischer »

kibwen wrote: post #56
KenoFischer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLVM 3.7.1 is a little less than 10 months old. Our RC period lasts for about 3 months, the start of which is the last point we'd have possibly upgraded LLVM. Upgrading LLVM is a little bit of a scary prospect for us since we find new bugs in every version (and fix them!), so though we considered moving to 3.8, 3.7 had been stable for a few months, so we didn't want to risk it. There's currently a PR to bump LLVM to…

Cool, mostly I was curious if the show-stopping issues you were seeing were actually fixed for good or whether 3.7.1 just happened to "accidentally" work. :)

Nothing accidental about it, it took quite a bit of work to fix all the issues we had ;).

Re: Julia 0.5 Highlights

#60

Post by papaf »

baldfat wrote: post #8

5 years ago I thought for sure I would be using Julia today. (I mostly use R) I have found that news tools have come into play that I haven't really felt the need for a faster language then R for my work. I'm interested in people's everyday use of Julia and how it has impacted your workflow. I don't work with "Big Data" most of my data sets are bellow 100k in size. Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

Anyone using Julia for medium and small data sets?

I have used Julia with a 50GB dataset for feature extraction while I was waiting for R to process the same dataset (10 minutes to an hour depending on the function). I actually learned some Julia while waiting for R. For what I was doing, Julia felt roughly 100 times faster (most delays under a minute).

However, I did not know about dplyr at the time and I will certainly try it in the next project. Although, I am skeptical that using fast libraries is a silver bullet since, at some point, the data will pass through some slow custom R code that I wrote myself.

I prefer to use Julia - the API feels cleaner and more manageable, I don't suffer from subtle type errors, and there is also the possibility of running things in parallel from the same repl. I also had no memory leaks -- I suffered a lot from the bloat caused by my use of R closures.

That said, the power and output quality of ggplot means that I will probably stay with R for plotting. There will also be times when CRAN has the only library that does something we need.

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