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)

Metaprogramming

Julia is homoiconic, which means that a program can be written symbolically in a way that it can be manipulated as data using the language. This adds great power in as much as the program can create genuine code as it is executing, modifying due to data types, circumstances occurring at runtime, and so on.

The ability of a programming language to be its own metalanguage is termed “reflection”, and this is a valuable language feature to facilitate metaprogramming, popular in list-processing languages such as Lisp.

As remarked on earlier, in compiling its code, problems with long execution times, which arise in most scripting languages, are not present in Julia.

Symbols and expressions

Before discussing macros, we need to understand the role of symbols and expressions in Julia.

The symbol is a type in Julia identified by a colon :() prefix:

julia> :(x)
:x

For complex expressions, combining variables, constants, and functions can also...