Julia: the future of scientific computing

John Gibson, University of New Hampshire

Integrated Applied Mathematics
Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Transturb17: Recurrent Flows Workshop
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics
UC Santa Barbara

2 February 2017

Julia is...

• new scientific programming language
• modern, dynamic, high-level, general-purpose like Python
• aimed squarely at numerics, like Matlab
• metaprogramming power of LISP
• fast as C, Fortran

Julia solves the two-language problem, makes new things possible

Julia development

• julia-0.1 2012....julia-0.5 2016....julia-1.0 2017?
• open-source MIT license, hosted on Github
• core development: MIT, Julia Computing LLC
• funding: Moore Foundation, NumFocus, Intel, Microsoft, Wall St. firms
• $\sim600$ contributors to core language and base libraries
• $\sim1000$ official add-on packages