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

Tasks in Julia


Tasks are a feature similar to coroutines in other languages. They help us to suspend an operation and resume when required.

In normal sequential code, when we call a function, let's say f1, and then call function f2, it's understood that f2 will start when the f1 function ends. But, in this whole operation, we do not have any control over the function once it has started to execute itself. A task in Julia is different, as it allows itself to be interrupted while getting executed!

Julia provides a function named task() to create any function as a task (also known as a coroutine). This makes the function behave differently from usual. However, the whole process is very different from a function call. There are two main reasons for this:

  • At the time when we want to interrupt and resume a task, there is no space taken at all by this operation, so there is no excess load on the call stack.
  • There is no specific order in which the tasks can be switched!

Let's see an example, to see how...