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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
