Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition

By : Ivo Balbaert
Book Image

Julia 1.0 Programming - Second Edition

By: Ivo Balbaert

Overview of this book

The release of Julia 1.0 is now ready to change the technical world by combining the high productivity and ease of use of Python and R with the lightning-fast speed of C++. Julia 1.0 programming gives you a head start in tackling your numerical and data problems. You will begin by learning how to set up a running Julia platform, before exploring its various built-in types. With the help of practical examples, this book walks you through two important collection types: arrays and matrices. In addition to this, you will be taken through how type conversions and promotions work. In the course of the book, you will be introduced to the homo-iconicity and metaprogramming concepts in Julia. You will understand how Julia provides different ways to interact with an operating system, as well as other languages, and then you'll discover what macros are. Once you have grasped the basics, you’ll study what makes Julia suitable for numerical and scientific computing, and learn about the features provided by Julia. By the end of this book, you will also have learned how to run external programs. This book covers all you need to know about Julia in order to leverage its high speed and efficiency for your applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Parallel operations and computing


In our multicore CPU and clustered computing world, it is imperative for a new language to have excellent parallel computing capabilities. This is one of the main strengths of Julia: providing an environment based on message-passing between multiple processes that can execute on the same machine or on remote machines.

In that sense, it implements the actor model (as Erlang, Elixir, and Pony do), but we'll see that the actual coding happens on a higher level than receiving and sending messages between processes, or workers (processors) as Julia calls them. The developer only needs to explicitly manage the main process from which all other workers are started. The message send and receive operations are simulated by higher-level operations that look like function calls.

Creating processes

To start with processes, add and make available the Distributed package with add Distributed, and using Distributed.

Julia can be started as a REPL or as a separate application...