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)

Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed three aspects of Julia that serve to make it stand out from other scripting languages.

First, we looked at the idea of multiple dispatch. This is a relatively new paradigm within object-oriented programming, very different from the more common polymorphic/inherence one, which uses a single dispatch method. The advantage we saw was that it permitted Julia to compile specific, compact, well-optimized code, and in addition, when coupled with delegation, meant that there was no need to implement routines for (say) array operations, broadcasting, and so on.

Secondly, we discussed homoiconic representations of the Julia code, in terms of symbols and expressions and how these can be instanced and then evaluated as part of the running process. This leads to a system for creating macros that can inject code into the program, which stands in place of (often) considerable boilerplates.

Finally, we saw how Julia “knits” all these...