Google Summer of Code is starting up, so I thought it would be a good time to share my workflow for developing my own Julia packages, as well as my workflow for contributing to other Julia packages. This does not assume familiarity with commandline Git, and instead shows you how to use a GUI (GitKraken) to make branches and PRs, as well as reviewing and merging code. You can think of it as an update to my old blog post on package development in Julia. However, this is not only updated but also improved since I am now able to walk through the "non-code" parts of package developing (such as setting up AppVeyor and code coverage).

Enjoy! (I quite like this video blog format: it was a lot less work)

So around 6 months ago, DifferentialEquations.jl was first registered. It was at first made to be a library which can solve "some" types of differential equations, and that "some" didn't even include ordinary differential equations. The focus was mostly fast algorithms for stochastic differential equations and partial differential equations.

Needless to say, Julia makes you too productive. Ambitions grew. By the first release announcement, much had already changed. Not only were there ordinary differential equation solvers, there were many. But the key difference was a change in focus. Instead of just looking to give a production-quality library of fast methods, a major goal of DifferentialEquations.jl became to unify the various existing packages of Julia to give one user-friendly interface.

Since that release announcement, we have made enormous progress. At this point, I believe we have both the most expansive and flexible ... READ MORE

Edit: This post is very old. See this post for more up-to-date information.

Differential equations are ubiquitous throughout mathematics and the sciences. In fact, I myself have studied various forms of differential equations stemming from fields including biology, chemistry, economics, and climatology. What was interesting is that, although many different people are using differential equations for many different things, pretty much everyone wants the same thing: to quickly solve differential equations in their various forms, and make some pretty plots to describe what happened.

The goal of DifferentialEquations.jl is to do exactly that: to make it easy solve differential equations with the latest and greatest algorithms, and put out a pretty plot. The core idea behind DifferentialEquations.jl is that, while it is easy to describe a differential equation, they have such diverse behavior that experts have spent over a century compiling ... READ MORE

What I want to share today is how you can use Julia's type system to hide performance gains in your code. What I mean is this: in many cases you may find out that the optimal way to do some calculation is not a "clean" solution. What do you do? What I want to do is show how you can define special arrays which are wrappers such that these special "speedups" are performed in the background, while having not having to keep all of that muck in your main algorithms. This is easiest to show by example.

The examples I will be building towards are useful for solving ODEs and SDEs. Indeed, these tricks have all been implemented as part of DifferentialEquations.jl and so these examples come from a real use case! They really highlight a main feature of Julia: ... READ MORE

In this tutorial we will go through the steps to finalizing a Julia package. At this point you have some functionality you wish to share with the world... what do you do? You want to have documentation, code testing each time you commit (on all the major OSs), a nice badge which shows how much of the code is tested, and put it into metadata so that people could install your package just by typing Pkg.add("Pkgname"). How do you do all of this?

Note: At anytime feel free to checkout my package repository DifferentialEquations.jl which should be a working example.

Generate the Package and Get it on Github

First you will want to generate your package and get it on Github repository. Make sure you have a Github account, and then setup the environment variables in the git shell:

How many workers do you choose when running a parallel job in Julia? The answer is easy right? The number of physical cores. We always default to that number. For my Core i7 4770K, that means it's 4, not 8 since that would include the hyperthreads. On my FX8350, there are 8 cores, but only 4 floating-point units (FPUs) which do the math, so in mathematical projects, I should use 4, right? I want to demonstrate that it's not that simple.

Where the Intuition Comes From

Most of the time when doing scientific computing you are doing parallel programming without even knowing it. This is because a lot of vectorized operations are "implicitly paralleled", meaning that they are multi-threaded behind the scenes to make everything faster. In other languages like Python, MATLAB, and R, this is also the case. Fire up MATLAB ... READ MORE

Datastructures.jl claims it's fast. How does it do? I wrote some quick codes to check it out. What I wanted to do is find out which algorithm does best for implementing a stack where each element is three integers. I tried filling a pre-allocated array, pushing into three separate vectors, and different implementations of the stack from the DataStructures.jl package.

function baseline()
stack = Array{Int64,2}(1000000,3)
for i=1:1000000,j=1:3
stack[i,j]=i
end
end
function baseline2()
stack = Array{Int64,2}(1000000,3)
for j=1:3,i=1:1000000
stack[i,j]=i
end
end
function f0()
stack = Array{Int64}(1000000,3)
for i = 1:1000000
stack[i,:] = [i,i,i]
end
end
function f02()
stack = Array{Int64}(3,1000000)
for i = 1:1000000
stack[:,i] = [i;i;i]
end
end
function f1()
stack1 = Vector{Int64}(1)