Julia's Release Process | Hacker News Reader

Julia's Release Process

julialang.org

It somehow skipped my radar. Few days ago I've noticed what this language actually is. Since couple of days I'm going through the manual top to bottom (not finished, somewhere in the middle at the moment). This language is beautiful.

I agree, Julia is a nice language, efficient, has a good deep learning library Flux, and calls out to Python easily. I have a tiny repo https://github.com/mark-watson/julia_my_code_snippets were I am collecting how-to snippets for things I do in other languages.

Are there any companies using Julia at the moment? This isn’t a snarky comment - I’m genuinely interested in hearing who’s using them, as well as reading any associated blogs etc.

You can see some examples here: https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/

Additionally, a lot of use cases were discussed at the recent JuliaCon (and in years past): https://www.youtube.com/user/JuliaLanguage/videos

There are a lot of backend data science applications using Julia. I was involved in a 3D printing startup and we developed a path planner beginning with Julia 0.3. You generally have to precompile your dependencies into the base library, but once this is all containerized things run great (pretty much as fast as C++ in our case with a little bit of JIT overhead in the cornercases), and you just have to create some sort of API for the service. For backend, long-running, services it is a great language now. The client-side application/static compilation story is massively improving and is fortunately mostly possible outside of the core languages development. E.g. the infrastructure is there in the core language for static compilation, but the interfaces are still developing.

Do you have a guide on how to compile packages into base image?

There are some docs here: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/sysimg/index.html

There is also now PackageCompiler that provides a nicer API without requiring you to build from source: https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

I'm working on a music composition tool called ngrid (http://ngrid.io). I'm using Julia to prototype some complicated DSP algorithms.

I've tried doing these algorithms in other languages (Swift, Rust, C, Python), all of them were getting in the way. Julia is really liberating, I feel like I can concentrate on the hard parts as opposed to fighting the language.

Surprised Rust was getting in the way (at least among the languages on that list), but it's awesome to hear how well Julia is doing.

I'll use Rust eventually, but Rust is super nitpicky. Julia is less nitpicky. I think that Rust is the perfect language for shipping things, Julia is the perfect language for prototyping. Rust is better for systems, like asynchronous, must-be-correct systems. Julia is forgiving but I'm not sure I can ship SDKs/APIs in it.

> Rust is the perfect language for shipping things, Julia is the perfect language for prototyping.

You hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what I do in many of my workflows. Fortunately, Julia is so good on its own that I don't have to do this very often. I can't wait until static compilation is done!

Julia has a ton of applications. At the most narrow, just think of areas Matlab shined: academic implementations, engineering code, etc.

We use Julia in production at Invenia. https://www.invenia.ca/

Off-topic: I highly suggest you to change font (at least, body font) on your website. It is very difficult to read.

I know that http://ternaryintelligence.com/ use Julia (because they use a package of mine and have reached out [and allowed me to state that they do so]), but it's also quite clear from past juliacons that http://relational.ai/ do.

I'm currently using Julia for a robot motion planning software , as well as a for a data science project. Julia is the preferred language of our company Laurium Labs https://www.lauriumlabs.com

Hire me!!!

I am just curious. This is something like ROS?

We use Julia for data science work and specific computationally intensive parts of our backend at Zoba: https://www.zoba.com/

At RelationalAI we use Julia. We're building a system that deeply merges a relational database management system and machine learning. The system is essentially entirely in Julia and currently is about 85K lines of code.

Our talks at JuliaCon have been on how to use Julia for systems programming (eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaQ7XuAR2yY ), which is not an obvious thing you would do.

We sponsored JuliaCon 2018/2019 and work with Julia Computing to fund improvements to Julia.

Let me know if you have any questions!

I can't find the github repo that contains a list of Julia companies. I want to help add all of these viaa PR

I am using Julia at Eli Lilly for fitting Bayesian models with MCMC.

It's nice to see such clear language about the language release process.

What's Julia's story on the NLP area? Would it be a good choice for "production-R&D" in this area?

...asking as someone who tool an interest in Julia a few years ago but jumped away from it bc it seemed not mature enough, but re-looking at it as way to solve the "tower of babel" + "inflexible languages" problems.

The Julia team overall did an amazing job with this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com