Julia - Kyle Barbary

Attending

About 25 people.

Kyle Barbary

Kyle is a postdoc in the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics and a BIDS fellow. Like many people, he has a website.

Julia

Julia is a high-level language (like Python) that emphasizes performance. Slides and Jupyter notebooks from the talk can be found in this Github repository.

If you’re living in future and the link is broken, look in https://github.com/kbarbary/talks/

Notes

Julia solves the two language problem, where high-level languages are easy to program in, but they use some other low level language on the backend. Julia, however, only uses Julia.

Fundamentally, Julia was created under the idea that dynamic languages don’t need to be slow. Julia seeks to be as fast as C, dynamic as ruby, useful as python, etc…

Julia is pretty fast. In some examples, very very fast. One of the cool things it does is to compile a function only on the first time you run it. Later runs are faster than the first.

The syntax seems really similar to python, except:

• ; takes you to the shell
• ? takes you to help
• backspace to get out of the shell or help
• supports unicode, like python 3
• you can use ipython notebook --profile julia to start IJulia
• typeof(var) gives the type of the variable var
• string interpolation is neat. You can use $var in a string and it will be expanded.
• Functions and loops use an explicit end
• Functions can be written like f(x) = 2x^2 + 3x + 1
• arrays can be either homogeneous or heterogeneous. If heterogeneous, the array type is Any.
• array type can be explicitly defined
• one-based indexing
• ranges are inclusive at both ends
• the code_native function gives the machine code for any function. Pretty sweet.

Rather than importing packages, the using syntax is used and the macros in that package are called with @func

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