Installation

  • Download for your plaform at http://julialang.org/downloads/
  • juliaup is a cross-platform installer useful to install specific Julia versions.
  • Homebrew is the best way to install Julia on macOS.
  • Most Linux distributions come with Julia packages in their repositories. However, these may lag somewhat behind the current rather fast development cycle.

Julia shell

  • Type julia in a terminal julia shell
  • “Tab” for autocompletion
  • pwd() (Current directory)
  • cd() (Change directory),
  • homedir() (Home directory)
  • Use ; to switch to unix shell.
  • help(“sin”) ou ?sin toggles the help mode.

Run julia code.

Julia programs use “.jl” extension by convention and can be executed in the julia prompt with:

include("my_program.jl")
  • Julia is first translated into an intermediate representation.
  • Then LLVM compiles it for your machine.

This means that

  • re-running the same code is faster the second time around
  • it runs at speeds comparable to compiled C or Fortran code

IDE

  • Julia shell
  • Command line : julia my_program.jl
  • Julia notebooks (Jupyter)
  • VS Code

I personally use Jupyter for development but VScode seems to be the most used environment.

Packages

  • Use ] to switch to package manager.
pkg> add IJulia

will install the package. Type help to display all available commands.

Use “backspace” to go back to the julia shell.

https://pkg.julialang.org

The package is installed in directory ~/.julia/

To import the package, type:

using IJulia

Jupyter notebook

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

type:

using IJulia
notebook()  # use notebook(detached=true)

To convert a notebook file .ipynb in julia program .jl:

  • In the top menu File->Download as
  • Command line : ipython nbconvert --to script my_notebook.ipynb.