Readit Newsmiguelraz commented on Julia 1.11 Highlights julialang.org/blog/2024/1... · Posted by u/jakobnissen
REPL tab completions let's gooooo
Really enjoyed this article, even though I’ve only ever explored the basics of Julia. I’m always on the lookout for articles and guides that would help people with basic R, Julia and Python REPL skills to learn software engineering patterns, computer science basics or, especially in the case of R, more general purpose languages.
Author here, that's great to hear!
Well, if you're looking for good REPL resources, I just happened to have done a 3 hour Julia REPL Mastery for a previous JuliaCon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLXEUt5KLc
I should shrink this a more bite-sized version at some point.
I'm a physicist whose written substantial projects in both Julia and Rust (and C/C++/Object Pascal/Java/Python/...). I'm also a person who refactors frequently. While my mind was initially blown away by all the cleverness in Julia, I eventually found that for non-trivial packages the "time-to-first-X" became painful - way more painful than compiling Rust code (mostly with debug occasionally with --release). Plus the amazing generality of Julia code was both a blessing and a curse. Julia really needs interfaces to ensure that a duck really is a duck. In the end, I find Rust (despite/maybe because of) the picky compiler to be overall much more productive. With Rust, I find I can make major refactors, when the code compiles and my test code runs, I'm good to go. With Julia, months after I've refactored, I'm still finding footguns. I still use both but it is Rust that has my heart these days.
Other thoughts: Developing Rust on Windows is painful but on Linux a joy. both cargo and Julia package managers are wonderful compared to other language alternatives.
I'll agree on several counts (as a physicist too!):
* Rust's tooling lets you have a base-floor of what is acceptable code that is much more palatable than non-top tier Julia codes. There's a world of difference opening a random crate's code in Rust that has been linted/clippy'd/check'd by the compiler rather than a random Julia package that a coworker/colleague just fired up. This tooling is getting better and better in Julia and I'd be interested to hear which Julia projects you worked on were really hampered by TTFX and refactoring woes. Hard agree on the footguns - I want the VSCode plugin to be better at detecting dead code, it cost me weeks on a project lately.
* I'm also excited for some notion of interfaces to come to Julia. Perhaps it will be a 2.0 thing, but there's still lots of design stuff to figure out.
* We have different understandings of "productive" for different focii then - I still find it painful to do the equivalent of `rand(1:10, (20, 20))` in Rust and I can get STEM people to be productive with Julia before you can even finishing saying "borrowchecker".
I'm still not understanding the switch to Rust other than for education (which is fine). All of the things you get from Rust with memory safety you get in Julia with the Garbage Collector?
I didn't switch!
At least for some scientific computing codes, but I did learn a lot of Rust along the way and extended my knowledge into (some) embedded and systems programming. Learning has been fun and the Rust people have been very friendly.
That stood out to me as well. The collection of reasons given to prefer Rust to C happens to be completely compatible with preferring Julia to C as well.
There's a different collection of reasons which wouldn't have that property (smol binary, suitable for realtime and embedded, etc), but it isn't the ones the author picked.
Author here!
Precisely, the most natural symbiosis for a Julia + Rust combo seems to fill a hard-realtime, critical safety or embedded niche with offline simulation.
The Py03 and maturin story is something that we haven't brought to Julia yet and I'd love to have some time to work on a tighter integration story there. For example, getting a hot-reload with Revise.jl and a bindings generator that watches file changes and recompiles and the fly so that a Julia REPL gets updated with the new definitions would be so enviable.
I haven't spoken to Tim Holy to see how to string that together but many of the pieces are there.