The downside about calling embedding Julia is C is that
everything's a pointer to the heap and you have to manually call
the garbage collector. If the same thing were implemented in D,
then D can handle the garbage collection as per normal. It seems
like D is a better fit for Julia than C in that regard.
On Friday, 12 December 2014 at 06:57:24 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 14:57:36 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 12:05:10 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 09:16:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 23:19:47 UTC, Mason McGill wrote:
On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 11:28:21 UTC, Chris wrote:
Maybe it's time to think about a D interface to Julia. If
Julia catches on within the scientific community, it would
be good to have a foot in the door. Science quickly
creates large code bases, unfortunately, so far it's
mostly Python and Matlab which makes it hard to use the
algorithms in real world applications.
I've actually been working on just that, on and off for a
few months now. Such a thing is kind of "anti-Julian",
though, since one of Julia's main goals is to reduce or
eliminate the need for mixed-language projects.
However, with D, you can compile small shared libraries
that can be automatically bound to your users' favorite
dynamic runtimes (via compile-time reflection). I'm hoping
this will be good for both D and Julia, allowing library
developers to reach a broader audience, and library
consumers greater flexibility.
I'll post on the D "announce" thread when I have something
working, and I'd definitely appreciate tests/bug-reports at
that time!
I was also thinking in the direction of enabling D to use
existing Julia code seamlessly, so you can just call it from
D (extern(J)), and maybe even efficiently compile it into
binaries along with D code, as you would with extern(C)
calls now.
It's really easy to do that with R. There is a package
RInside that makes it trivial to embed R in a C++ program,
and it's not difficult to use with D.
Would be cool if we had something like this for Julia (if it
really catches on).
I guess you can call D from Julia very easily via the C API and
would just need to declare C calling convention in your D code.
It may be that with a combination of Julia and D one has the
best of both worlds - no compromise with speed and efficient
resource use on the number crunching with a nice shell /
Ipython notebook that is still pretty fast on the front end.
Nicer would be a wrapper a la PyD that seamlessly translates
between types.
Then the other thing is to translate julia.h into D so that you
can embed Julia. That's a little work but not so hard. More
about how this works with C here:
http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.3/manual/embedding/
