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)

Working with the OS and pipelines

Up to now, we have been discussing ways for Julia to operate with other programming languages.

For C (and Fortran), this was relatively straightforward, as Julia was designed with a mechanism to interface directly with shared libraries (aka DDLs on Windows). So, any system that effectively operates via a shared library is immediately available to Julia.

This means that graphics frameworks, database management systems (DBMS), and so on can all be made (more or less) easily accessible, and several successful packages have been implemented whose code depends on (and requires the installation of) third-party libraries.

These have been termed wrapper packages, as opposed to “native” ones, written purely in Julia. In practice, many packages are often a combination of both paradigms rather than being principally one or the other.

For some other languages, notably Python, R, and Java, effort was expended on creating usable interface...