.. index:: Julia
.. _Julia:

Julia
=====

Description
-----------

Julia is a high-level, dynamic programming language for technical computing.  Whilst new, it is very performant and has some interesting features.

User instructions
-----------------

Julia 0.4.7 is installed on all workstations from the Debian repositories. More recent versions are available via the modules system.  To add it to your environment run:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ module load julia/1.0.0

Extensive documentation is available on the `Julia website <http://julialang.org>`_.

Source
------

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia

License
-------

MIT.

Admin notes
-----------

Tarballs with precompiled generic Linux binaries are available. The module
was installed by unpacking one of these in the appropriate location. The
install can then be tested with :code:`Base.runtests()`. All tests passed
with the installed module.

If you wish to compile the code via the git repository, this is
straightforward, though takes quite a while, but should give you a binary
that's more optimized for your hardware. Each release is tagged.
To compile julia as a module, the following could be done (this will let Julia
compile its own dependencies):

.. code-block:: bash

    $ git clone --recursive git://github.com/JuliaLang/julia.git
    $ cd julia
    $ git checkout v0.6.2
    $ echo -e "prefix=/common/debian/9.1/Core/julia/julia-0.6.0\nMARCH=x86-64" > Make.user
    $ make
    $ make install

Note, when I tried this myself (with no modules loaded), one of the in-built
tests gave an error.