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Comment by etrautmann | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment on the difficulty of porting Matlab code to Julia? It appears extremely straightforward, but I'm guessing that many toolbox functions aren't implemented in Julia yet?

In academia, there's tremendous momentum behind Matlab, but Julia would solve many problems with licensing, building more complex systems, etc.

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There's a growing number of packages written in Julia (http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/) and using the PyCall package you can call any python package if you're missing functionality. Do have a look to see if what you need is implemented. Other than that porting existing MATLAB code is extremely easy since the syntax is similar in many cases.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the core devs.

One thing that is holding me back from porting my Matlab code to Julia is manual loop-unrolling. "It seems that, when using Julia, one needs to unlearn everything you’ve ever learned about vectorisation in MATLAB." [1]. Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.

[1]: http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=59

> Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.

The @devec macro should help, meanwhile:

    @devec r = a .* b + c .* d + a

... will devectorize the expression. It's not perfect, but it's definitely useful.

https://github.com/lindahua/Devectorize.jl

Do you feel 2D plotting is sufficiently developed to be useful at this point?

Sufficiently developed? No way. Is it getting there? Yes I think. There are no plotting facilities part of the standard library, but external packages like Winston [1] are available -- but the syntax was verbose for my taste, so I let it pass.

According to this SO question[2], there was some web-REPL plotting earlier but it is unmaintained now.

[1] https://github.com/nolta/Winston.jl

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14970817/plot-not-defined...

Agreed. If you are worried about the syntax for plotting, take a look at Gadfly, which aims to implements the Grammar of Graphics language for julia.

https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl

You can also plot with Gaston, which is a frontend for gnuplot.

https://github.com/mbaz/Gaston.jl

Docs: https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gastondoc-0.5.5....

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