Book Image

Learning Julia

By : Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal
Book Image

Learning Julia

By: Anshul Joshi, Rahul Lakhanpal

Overview of this book

Julia is a highly appropriate language for scientific computing, but it comes with all the required capabilities of a general-purpose language. It allows us to achieve C/Fortran-like performance while maintaining the concise syntax of a scripting language such as Python. It is perfect for building high-performance and concurrent applications. From the basics of its syntax to learning built-in object types, this book covers it all. This book shows you how to write effective functions, reduce code redundancies, and improve code reuse. It will be helpful for new programmers who are starting out with Julia to explore its wide and ever-growing package ecosystem and also for experienced developers/statisticians/data scientists who want to add Julia to their skill-set. The book presents the fundamentals of programming in Julia and in-depth informative examples, using a step-by-step approach. You will be taken through concepts and examples such as doing simple mathematical operations, creating loops, metaprogramming, functions, collections, multiple dispatch, and so on. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply your skills in Julia to create and explore applications of any domain.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Data Visualization and Graphics

Under the hood


Julia is a great programming language. So far, we have talked about various reasons for this and given a number of examples to showcase how fast and easy it is to code and execute with Julia. But, how did Julia end up being this good? Sure, there must be different reasons for the positive argument, but in this part of the chapter, we will see all that goes on inside Julia to give it the edge it currently has.

Femtolisp

Femtolisp was started by Jeff Bezanson as a GitHub side project. According to him, the aim was to write the fastest lisp interpreter that could be written in under 1,000 lines of C code. This was the initial idea, which later grew bigger and gained attention. Femtolisp is simple and built using scheme.

To open up the lisp interpreter, you just need to type in julia --lisp:

The Julia Core API

Checking out the code of Julia, as available on GitHub, we can clearly distinguish that around 70% of the code for Julia is written in Julia. This is great for any language....