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)

Configuring Julia and the OS

In the first chapter, we looked at installing Julia. For Windows and Apple, it is very easy: just a matter of downloading an executable and running it; this does, however, put the systems in a “known” place. Early versions of Linux also came with installations for Debian and Red Hat package managers but now this has been superseded by a (zipped) tar archive, which gives the user more latitude on where to install Julia.

Getting Julia sources

Julia sources are downloaded from the following directory: https://julialang.org/downloads. Currently, there are distributions available for Apple (Silicon) and FreeBSD in this directory. It’s worth noting that FreeBSD is a Linux derivative and served as the precursor to OS X. Therefore, the discussion here is applicable to these platforms as well. You have the option to download a source distribution, not necessarily for the purpose of building it, but rather to explore the code and gain insights...