Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By : Malcolm Sherrington
Book Image

Mastering Julia - Second Edition

By: Malcolm Sherrington

Overview of this book

Julia is a well-constructed programming language which was designed for fast execution speed by using just-in-time LLVM compilation techniques, thus eliminating the classic problem of performing analysis in one language and translating it for performance in a second. This book is a primer on Julia’s approach to a wide variety of topics such as scientific computing, statistics, machine learning, simulation, graphics, and distributed computing. Starting off with a refresher on installing and running Julia on different platforms, you’ll quickly get to grips with the core concepts and delve into a discussion on how to use Julia with various code editors and interactive development environments (IDEs). As you progress, you’ll see how data works through simple statistics and analytics and discover Julia's speed, its real strength, which makes it particularly useful in highly intensive computing tasks. You’ll also and observe how Julia can cooperate with external processes to enhance graphics and data visualization. Finally, you will explore metaprogramming and learn how it adds great power to the language and establish networking and distributed computing with Julia. By the end of this book, you’ll be confident in using Julia as part of your existing skill set.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Package management

We have noted that Julia uses GitHub as a repository for the language source and a large number of Julia packages are hosted there.

Note

Other sources for Julia packages may be found on Bitbucket, GitLab, and so on; see stackshare.io for a full discussion: https://stackshare.io/stackups/bitbucket-vs-github-vs-gitlab.

As a full discussion of the package system is given on the Julia website, here, we will cover some of the main commands to use.

In v1.0, a new package manager has been introduced. Given the increase in registered packages, now approaching 2,000, the previous version (which relied on separate invocations of Git) became very slow, especially when using Windows.

Earlier, a method using the Pkg interface for package management was discussed. An alternate approach is to use one of the subset systems from the REPL. This is one of three such subsystems:

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