Book Image

Julia High Performance

By : Avik Sengupta
Book Image

Julia High Performance

By: Avik Sengupta

Overview of this book

Julia is a high performance, high-level dynamic language designed to address the requirements of high-level numerical and scientific computing. Julia brings solutions to the complexities faced by developers while developing elegant and high performing code. Julia High Performance will take you on a journey to understand the performance characteristics of your Julia programs, and enables you to utilize the promise of near C levels of performance in Julia. You will learn to analyze and measure the performance of Julia code, understand how to avoid bottlenecks, and design your program for the highest possible performance. In this book, you will also see how Julia uses type information to achieve its performance goals, and how to use multuple dispatch to help the compiler to emit high performance machine code. Numbers and their arrays are obviously the key structures in scientific computing – you will see how Julia’s design makes them fast. The last chapter will give you a taste of Julia’s distributed computing capabilities.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Inlining


As we've mentioned before, Julia code consists of many small functions. Unlike most other language implementations, some of the core primitives in the base library are also implemented in Julia. This means that the function call overhead has the potential to be a bottleneck in a Julia program. This is mitigated using some aggressive inlining performed by the Julia compiler.

Inlining is an optimization performed by a compiler, where the contents of a function or method is inserted directly into the body of the caller of that function. Thus, instead of making a function call, execution continues directly by executing the operations of the callee within the caller's body.

In addition, many compiler optimization techniques work within the body of a single function. Inlining, therefore, allows many more optimizations to be effective within the program.

Tip

Compiler optimizations

Julia uses the LLVM compiler to generate machine code, which is finally run on the CPU. Most of the usual compiler...