Re: Julia language

["Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 07:39:01AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote:
> On 2017/11/20 09:43:44 -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 09:30:54AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote:
> >> On 2017/11/19 4:19, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> >>> On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 12:43:19AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote:
> >>>> Hi Paul,
> >>>>
> >>>> Have you heard of "Julia" language?
> >>>>
> >>>> JFYI,
> >>>> As can be seen in its official page at https://julialang.org/ and a Wikipedia
> >>>> article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language),
> >>>> it looks like one of promising answers to perfbook's Section 2.2 "Parallel
> >>>> Programming Goals".
> >>>>
> >>>> As long as high-performance number crunching is concerned, it claims to have
> >>>> comparable performance to C, with a programming productivity much better
> >>>> than C + MPI.
> >>>>
> >>>> Note: I'm not a user of the language at the moment. I just heard of it at
> >>>> a twitter hashtag #julialang.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'd like you to check it up and (hopefully) update the above mentioned
> >>>> section in perfbook.
> >>>
> >>> I had heard of it, but I had not heard of it being seriously proposed
> >>> as the answer to Section 2.2.  I have added it to todo.txt with your
> >>> Reported-by.
> >>>
> >>> Have you or has someone you know used this for a large parallel-programming
> >>> project?  (Just looking for some real-world confirmation.)
> >>
> >> So you want a secondary-source info on the real-world use?
> >>
> >> I learned of Julia from Gen Kuroki's twitter activity since this June.
> >> He is a mathematician at Tohoku Univiersity, and experimenting/demonstrating
> >> Monte Carlo analysis of several statistic problems using Julia (on a Windows PC!).
> >> But what he is doing right now doesn't qualify as a _large_ parallel-programming
> >> project.
> >>
> >> There is a case-studies page at https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/,
> >> but this should be regarded as a primary source.
> >>
> >> One of the case study, "Deep Learning for Medical Diagnosis" at
> >> https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/ibm.html, looks like a collaboration
> >> of IBM and Juliacomputing.
> >>
> >> Could this qualify as a real-world large parallel programming example?
> > 
> > Maybe...  Some evaluation and a proposal at the end...
> > 
> > But please understand that 40+ years working in this field has made me
> > deeply skeptical of sweeping claims for new languages.  Now, don't get
> > me wrong, Julia might well be great stuff that deserves mention in the
> > book, but let's first take a quick look at history.
> > 
> > Let's start with my employer, IBM.  This URL is informative:
> > 
> > http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf
> > 
> > This is a 1954 report on the specifications for FORTRAN, reportedly
> > co-authored by none other than John Backus.  Please see page 3, first
> > full paragraph:
> > 
> > 	Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging,
> > 	it should be possible to solve problems for less than half the
> > 	cost that would be required without such a system.
> > 
> > To be fair, they were comparing coding in FORTRAN to coding in IBM 704
> > assembly language, but still, my use of FORTRAN in the 1970s involved
> > -significant- coding and debugging.  ;-)
> 
> I suppose it was the only language you could choose.
> 
> > 
> > Julia's case-studies page is impressive, but at first glance it appears
> > to mostly be centered on HPC, which leads me to question the "generality"
> > part of the iron triangle of parallel programming.  Gen Kuroki's use
> > case seems to be in a similar area.
> 
> As I said in the first mail in this thread:
> 
>     >>>> As long as high-performance number crunching is concerned, [...]
> 
> I was not sure of "generality" either.
> 
> > 
> > So what to do?
> > 
> > For the upcoming release, nothing.  After all, it is only a few days away.
> > 
> > But perhaps later it might be good to expand Section 17.4 ("Functional
> > Programming for Parallelism") to cover languages instead of just
> > functional programming.  Julia might fit in here, as might Rust (given
> > the ownership aspects of its type system), Go (another popular parallel
> > system), and maybe even Python (because everyone and their dog seems
> > to use it).
> > 
> > Does that seem reasonable?
> 
> Sounds good!
> 
> Julia seems the youngest one among them.
> We can wait for (say) a few years to see where it goes, I suppose.

And here is Eric Raymond's take on this:  http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724

Thoughts?

							Thanx, Paul