Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

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> But this is also true for any other statically typed language. Java/Scala/Kotlin/Go/Rust you name it.

Notice how none of those languages have a vibrant numerical computing ecosystem anywhere near Julia's despite being just as old or older than julia and being big, well known languages with large communities? It's almost like scientific programmers don't want to do science in those languages.

I don't think it's an accident that Julia's package developers have been remarkably productive compared to Python. The best differnetial equations library available on Python right now is a wrapper for Julia's DifferentialEquations.jl. This is not because Python users don't care about differential equations or because there's not enough money or manpower. Chris Rackauckas did more on his own in julia for differential equation solving in his first couple years than entire industries did in Python over decades.

Julia is a productive and performant language. When you hold up Java and Python, you're asking me to choose between productivity and performance (at best, obviously Python has serious productivity problems and Java has serious performance problems despite those being their touted strengths).

Come on. It's not like Julia has a PyTorch / TF equivalent (Flux.jl doesn't even come close, sorry). Until then, you can't seriously say that Julia's ecosystem is rich. Once we start seeing DL/ML papers coming out with POC written in Julia we can call it a day.

So you're disappointed that Mike Innes and a handful of other open source contributors haven't quite caught up yet with the efforts of Google and Facebook pouring billions of dollars into TensorFlow and PyTorch in pursuit of one of the most lucrative and hyped modern markets?

Well, for that it depends on what you're into. For traditional, coding bootcamp machine learning, Flux.jl is still behind, but I'd point out that the only high performance, usable NeuralODE library is still built on Flux.jl and DifferentialEquations.jl as far as I understand and mostly consists of some import statements and a few function compositions / overloads. Someone already did deep learning on fully homomorphic encrypteded data using Flux.jl. Many 'niche', cutting edge things are still best done with Flux.jl because Flux is fundamentally more flexible than things like PyTorch and TensorFlow. It's using the entire programming language as a framework in a very generic way that PyTorch and Tensorflow can only ape by building ever more complex custom compilers and DSLs with ever diverging semantics from Python.

If Flux.jl is an example of the Julia community's failures to compete I'd say we have very little to worry about, and I look forward to seeing what a well funded commercial entity could build in Julia with a few billion dollars.

Consider me a curious client who trains and deploys production models on a weekly basis and considers Julia. Well even if I could rewrite our model in Julia how would I go with prod deployment and who would help me if I get stuck? For Tensorflow, I can use Java API and effortlessly plug in trained model into our Java stack. In case of PyTorch we can bring up a Python service with the same little effort just because Python has it all.

When it comes to work, niche languages lose their ground once you start digging deeper and attempt to venture slightly outside their focus domain. They do not have dedicated teams or industrial money and will always lag behind. Look at DL4J, they have a whole company working on it for many years.

Of course time will tell but considering the results so far I am not convinced that investing time into learning a new language will pay off. Especially considering Julia interop with C/C++.

> Especially considering Julia interop with C/C++.

Is the interop bad?

As far as I'm aware, Julia interop with C/C++ is particularly excellent. So, maybe the poster can clarify?

Well, it's been 4 years so maybe it's better now: https://www.zverovich.net/2016/05/13/giving-up-on-julia.html

Well, running "Hello, World" still takes 0.3 ms :D

That is truly the dumbest critique of Julia that's been published. So dumb I didn't bother refuting it at the time, but apparently people take it seriously?

- Hello world is slow? Really? Yeah, it's not a hello-world-oriented programming language.

- One-based indexing is questionable? Troll much?

- Using `ccall` is unsafe? No kidding, there's no way to call a shared library that doesn't crash if you lie to it.

- `@printf` sucks? Then don't use it. I never do. The `print` function works for 99% of cases.

- Julia development is slowing down? Whiffed on that call.

Regarding the C ffi point, you can use Clang.jl to generate correct bindings so that you don't have to read C header files. But note that if you want to call a function in C you need to look at and match its signature, so it's not all that onerous to have to do the same from Julia. Julia's C interop is so good that several other languages have copied it since it came out.

Yeah, but how else would you judge about the language before spending months on learning it? Critique can be dumb like 1-based index for arrays or nitpicking on syntax. However, I tried Julia several years ago and start-up times was the reason I dropped it. Was it a dumb thing to do too? I was disappointed that a promise of being a dynamic language came with some "but"s. And if you have a lot of scripts that you need to run one-by-one, you don't notice the real speed of the language, all you notice is sluggishness.

If one isn't willing to spend some time on learning a language, one simply shouldn't write a scathing blogpost about it.

> So dumb I didn't bother refuting it at the time, but apparently people take it seriously?

You definitely should have because from what I saw during my google searches this idiotic article was mentioned a couple of times.

You aren't making a fair comparison here.

Flux is more generic, flexible and thus harder to build. Julia could have been there already if the small ML team w was working with TF type design goals. But they aren't, and therefore are ahead of TF/pytorch in many respects.

Also not as much effort has gone into making this polished for standard deep learning stuff, but you can see the fruit in things like reusing the same code for ML on holomophically encrypted data, faster than pytorch/tf deep learning on graphs and 3d inputs, faster, easier composability with ODEs and prob programming etc.

A more fair comparison is KNet.jl which is a very worthy competitor to things like TensorFlow or PyTorch with comparable speed and roughly equivalent flexibility. It's just not talked about as much by Julia people because what most Julia people really care about is the flexibility and composability of Flux, so they're willing to forgive it lagging a bit in raw performance (as long as they believe it'll catch up eventually).

Neither does Python, PyTorch / TF equivalents are available to any language with FFI to C and C++ libraries, which are the languages they are actually written on.

Interfacing with C++ is a lot of work and there is no language in existence that can do that effortlessly. Nim and D are the ones that come close. Julia's interoperability with C/C++ is quite poor according to feedback from more experienced Julia users.

.NET does it relativity easy given C++/CLI, and on the native side there is COM, UWP, C++/CX and C++/WinRT.

So any language on Windows able to use COM/UWP, gets those Python libraries, sorry, C++ libraries.

The effort to use Julia FFI to interoperate with them is hardly any different than using Python FFI, with the big difference that in what concerns Julia it would be possible to re-implement them in pure Julia, while the Python community keeps wondering about to write more FFI code to native libraries or finally start adopting PyPy.

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