Hello, On Saturday, May 31, 2014 4:40:02 PM UTC+2, Robert Gates wrote: > > Dear Julia users: > > my colleagues and I are planning on writing cross-platform (Linux > variants, OS X, Windows) commercial software for the research community, > preferably in Julia. Our projected release date will be some time in the > next 3-4 years. It is crucial to user-friendliness and protection of > intellectual property that Julia supports (and documents) its compilation > to stand-alone processor-native code. If that code depends on > shared-libraries, it should be possible to install these together with the > distributed application without incurring licensing issues in a commercial > context. Further, it will be necessary to develop full-featured GUIs with > interactive 3D plotting features such as patch with full alpha > transparency. Of course it is imperative that such implementations be easy > to interface with and stable enough for commercial deployment. > > The question we are left with: will Julia be ready in 3-4 years? If we use > Julia, will we be faced with having to debug Julia packages instead of our > own code? Will the end-user ever notice that we have used Julia for > development? We have heard that C, Fortran can be called easily in Julia, > i.e., we should be able to call solver such as PARDISO without issue? This > will be crucial, as our problems rely on the solution of large, > unsymmetric, and possibly indefinite systems. > > Of course, we needn't have every feature imaginable by man, and we will be > happy to contribute to the Julia project if anything exotic should arise. > > Regards, > > Robert + coworkers >
*Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future (Niels Bohr).* Let's try: * deployability is a common topic, so it's expected there will be effort spend * saving IP in code is a common topic, so someone will have a solution and share (hopefully) * you and your colleagues are happy to contribute to Julia, at least your effort will be spend The hard thing is: 3D GUI. I made my own experiences with toolkits and drawing/painting libraries and i'd say, you need an expert anyway (choosing julia or not). Even if you only adapt an available solution, it's hard to make it work, robust, maintainable and user-friendly.
