Installing Julia

November 27, 2019 — June 3, 2020

computers are awful
julia

Installing Julia.

Figure 1

1 Bareback

Distribution packages from your Linux OS, say, are generally veeery old in Julia years; if you want faddish features that are the whole reason you got lured to Julia, download from the main site.

On macOS you could do this to put the binary in your path.

ln -s /Applications/Julia-1.1.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia \
  ~/bin/julia

2 JuliaPro

Infrequent but luxurious Julia installs provided through JuliaPro.

I don’t use these since I had early problems with them which turned out to be in the Intel MKL builds. Probably resolved now since Intel MKL is no longer packaged.1 🤷‍♂

They come with everything packaged up and are a simple way of getting started. I’m not 100% clear on how they do package management and interact with other Julia installations since I don’t use them.

3 Containerized

Aurelio Amerio avises on a minimal dockerized julia.

4 Packaging tips

Bogumił Kamiński advises always adding packages as

Pkg.add("Pipe", preserve=PRESERVE_DIRECT)

and updating with

Pkg.update(level=UPDATELEVEL_PATCH)

This way you avoid dependency hell.

5 Alternative packaging system

Kip is an alternative Julia packaging system. Good on them. Having bookmarked it, I will not return to that project until I have pressing need.

Footnotes

  1. In general if you are a research you should avoid Intel MKL because you are unlikely to truly want to make your code many gigabytes larger, complicate the licensing, and crash more often to maybe shave a few points off the execution time for some hypothetical end user who you will never contact.↩︎