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)

Basic I/O

Julia views its data in terms of a byte stream. This may be from/to standard input (stdin) or standard output (stdout), which may be superseded by a disk file.

If this is coming from a network socket or a pipe, this is essentially asynchronous, but the programmer doesn’t need to be aware of this as the stream will block until cleared by an I/O operation. The primitives are the read() and write() functions. They deal with binary data. With formatted data, such as text, several other functions are layered on top.

It provides very efficient operations both locally and over a distributed system (for example, a network) and is central to Julia’s efficient approach to I/O.

Terminal I/O

Previously, we mentioned that Julia has the concept of stdin and stdout. This is inherited from an idea in Posix-compliant operating systems. Its purpose is to stream data through I/O channels.

All streams in Julia have at least a read and a write routine; these take...