Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Julia 1.9

julialang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 216 posts

Re: Julia 1.9

#51

Post by sundarurfriend »

jakobnissen wrote: post #45
sundarurfriend wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tradeoffs are somewhat larger load times (TTL) The post says "TTL has also been reduced, albeit not as dramatically as TTFX." And the graph seems to indicate the same. Is that not true, or are you comparing it to pre-1.7 TTLs (which are not shown in the post), or is it just context(/project)-dependent?

Both are true. Package images and the use of PrecompileTools makes packages load slightly slower, because there is more data to load, namely all the precompiled machine code. It's still faster to load than to compile, so the gains in TTFX (i.e. compilation) outweighs the gains in TTL (i.e. loading). For 1.9, code loading has also been optimised, such that code loading is in many cases faster in 1.9 than in 1.7. Howev…

Thanks, that was a great explanation!

Re: Julia 1.9

#52

Post by sundarurfriend »

jcheng wrote: post #21
datadeft wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it is milliseconds based on the names and the results later in the article. - time-to-first-execution (TTFX) - time-to-load (TTL)

I think it's actually seconds, which is why this improvement is so important.

Yep, definitely seconds, although it's weird that the numbers are just presented by themselves, without any information about what system specs they're from. The point here is to highlight the relative difference, of course, but it would still be nice to get an idea of where the absolute numbers stand and what kind of machine you need to get these numbers.

Re: Julia 1.9

#53

Post by freilanzer »

deepsun wrote: post #10
thelastbender12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this comment necessary on every Julia-related post? I don't even use Julia outside tutorials but this adds no value beyond things that have already been said N number of times. Every programming language doesn't need to become _the_ language to do something. They are experiments in how to best express what you want to compute. Even if Julia never takes off, they explore multiple directions other languages migh…

They probably want to say "why is this post necessary for every Julia release?".

Why not? If users didn't want to see it they wouldn't upvote it. So people want to see these posts. As simple as that. Why do we need this discussion on almost every Julia post that gets voted to the front page?

Re: Julia 1.9

#54

Post by kristofferc »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #46
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly there is a lot of magic going on in very popular Python libraries that implement autodiff or JIT compilation like PyTorch or JAX -- although the maturity of the ecosystem does mean that it is often quite well hidden. For the other languages, well... if you don't think C++'s templates tricks, Haskell's extension potpourri or indeed Rust's own combination of traits and type-level programming techniques can ge…

I really don't feel that there is magic in PyTorch or jax, but that may be because I have written my own autograd libs. In PyTorch you have a graph that is created on runtime by connecting the operations together in a transparent manner. Jax may feel a bit magic, but all that's done is sending / splitting tracers and recording the operations and compiling; by limiting the language, you have controlled branching with…

What did you feel you needed to use macros for?

Re: Julia 1.9

#55

Post by freilanzer »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #46
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly there is a lot of magic going on in very popular Python libraries that implement autodiff or JIT compilation like PyTorch or JAX -- although the maturity of the ecosystem does mean that it is often quite well hidden. For the other languages, well... if you don't think C++'s templates tricks, Haskell's extension potpourri or indeed Rust's own combination of traits and type-level programming techniques can ge…

I really don't feel that there is magic in PyTorch or jax, but that may be because I have written my own autograd libs. In PyTorch you have a graph that is created on runtime by connecting the operations together in a transparent manner. Jax may feel a bit magic, but all that's done is sending / splitting tracers and recording the operations and compiling; by limiting the language, you have controlled branching with…

> The main reason I have had such with Julia

Such what? Fun? ;)

Re: Julia 1.9

#56

Post by sundarurfriend »

> We came to the conclusion that a global fastmath option is impossible to use correctly in Julia.

I'd assumed that global fastmath was a bad idea in general, and assumed that was the reason for making this a no-op. Is there a reason it's particularly bad in Julia, some assumptions the standard library makes or something?

Re: Julia 1.9

#57

Post by sundarurfriend »

> Pkg.add can now be told to prefer to add already installed versions of packages (those that already have been downloadedd onto your machine)

> set the env var `JULIA_PKG_PRESERVE_TIERED_INSTALLED` to true.

How is this different from setting `Pkg.offline(true)` and then doing the `add`? I don't know the intricacies of how it works, but that's what I've been doing when I just need to try something out in a temp environment.

Re: Julia 1.9

#58

Post by kristofferc »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #57

> Pkg.add can now be told to prefer to add already installed versions of packages (those that already have been downloadedd onto your machine) > set the env var `JULIA_PKG_PRESERVE_TIERED_INSTALLED` to true. How is this different from setting `Pkg.offline(true)` and then doing the `add`? I don't know the intricacies of how it works, but that's what I've been doing when I just need to try something out in a temp envir…

One difference is that Pkg.offline(true) will error if it cannot resolve something with packages already installed while with this option it will fall back to downloading new versions.

Re: Julia 1.9

#59

Post by markkitti »

geokon wrote: post #37
aborsy wrote: post #6

Matlab users should switch to Julia. It’s a real programming language, and better in many ways. I provide the option of Julia in my tutorials. Students are lazy, and don’t want to explore something new. Most of them stick with matlab. What prevents matlab users from switching? The syntax is similar.

I don't know if you genuinely want feedback... But I'll share my very short experience. I tried Julia one time a few years back. I'll be honest, I didn't put in a lot of effort into (but nor will most potential Matlab converts - bc people are busy and have stuff to do) It's got a frustrating "not fun" on-boarding. ie. the number of minutes from downloading "Julia" to getting cool satisfying results 1. It not a calcul…

A lot has changed in a few years. This release is a big one.

1. I run Julia on my smartphone and often use it as calculator.

2. You typically only need Plots.jl for most needs. See https://docs.juliaplots.org/stable/

3. See https://juliaacademy.com

Another alternative environment are Pluto notebooks. It's reactive like a spreadsheet, but easy to use in your browser.

https://featured.plutojl.org/

I have several users without much coding experience using Pluto notebooks just to generate plots from CSV files. They are finding the combination of a web based interface, reactive UI, and fast execution easier to use than a MATLAB Live script.

Re: Julia 1.9

#60

Post by stodor89 »

aborsy wrote: post #6

Matlab users should switch to Julia. It’s a real programming language, and better in many ways. I provide the option of Julia in my tutorials. Students are lazy, and don’t want to explore something new. Most of them stick with matlab. What prevents matlab users from switching? The syntax is similar.

> Students are lazy, and don’t want to explore something new.

Pretty much everything students do is new to to them.

Post reply on HN