Julia is a powerful programming language that is designed to enable high-performance applications with developer productivity in mind. Its dynamic nature allows you to quickly perform small-scale experiments and then migrate to larger applications. Its introspection tools allow us to optimize performance by analyzing how high-level code is translated into lower-level instructions and machine code. Its metaprogramming facility helps more advanced programmers to build custom syntax for their specific domain usage. Its multiple dispatch and generic function features make it easy to build new capabilities by extending existing functions. For these and many more reasons, Julia is an excellent tool for developing applications across a wide spectrum of industries.
This book fulfills several demands from Julia developers. A desire to write better code. A desire to improve system performance. A desire to design software that is easy to maintain. From the time that the Julia language was born to its magnificent milestone of version 1.0 in August 2018, many design patterns have already emerged from the brightest minds, ranging from the core developers of the language to heavy users of the language. At times, these patterns were presented in blog posts and conferences. Sometimes, they showed up in random discussion threads on the Julia Discourse forum. At other times, they come up in casual talks between community members on various Julia Slack channels. This book is a collection of patterns, documenting the best approaches to designing high-quality Julia applications.
The primary objective of this book is to organize these well-proven patterns into a format that is easily consumable by the Julia developer community. There are several benefits to organizing and naming these patterns:
- It allows developers to communicate with each other more easily.
- It allows developers to better understand code that uses these patterns.
- It allows developers to articulate when a pattern should be applied.
The goal of this book is simple but powerful – after reading this book, you should be more knowledgeable about how to design and develop software in Julia. In addition, the material presented in this book can serve as a reference for any future discussions regarding design patterns in Julia. As we know from history, new design patterns will continue to emerge alongside the continuous evolution of the Julia language.
I hope you enjoy this book. Happy reading!