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)

Generated functions

A generated function is a user-defined function that gets expanded at compile time, allowing it to generate code based on its argument types. It has proved to be of value in some specialized areas but is not widely used.

To define a generated function, we use the @generated macro, which indicates that the function should be expanded at compile time, rather than executed at runtime.

The body of the generated function has access to the types of arguments but not their values, so it is possible to perform type-based dispatch based on the function’s arguments.

They are seen as being useful when the behavior of the code depends on the specific types involved. For example, when mathematical operations need to be performed differently for integers and floating-point numbers, a generated function can create optimized code for each case.

It should be noted that work on the compilation and execution of “regular” Julia code has currently made...