[ANN] JuBox - a scientific Julia distribution

JuBox is a Julia distribution that comes with commonly used scientific packages out of the box. Load Makie, DifferentialEquations, or any included package immediately—all pre-compiled on GitHub CI and ready to use. Additional packages can be installed via Pkg without triggering recompilation of pre-installed packages.

This can be useful in educational settings to prevent precompilation of heavy packages during interactive computer lab sessions, and helps newcomers get started with popular ecosystem packages for a smoother first-time experience.

What’s included

  • Julia 1.12 with approximately 700 pre-compiled packages
  • Core packages: Makie, DifferentialEquations, ModelingToolkit, Integrals, DataFrames, QuantumOptics, Images, Turing
  • Revise and Infiltrator configured to launch automatically
  • Native installers for Linux, macOS, and Windows

Getting started

Download the installer for your platform and CPU architecture from the release page. Note that macOS and Windows installers are self-signed and require additional installation steps—see the README for details. Once installed, launch JuBox from the desktop menu.

Custom distributions

The JuBox repository serves as a template for creating tailored distributions. Fork it, modify the Project.toml with your preferred packages, and run the “Build Release Assets” GitHub Actions workflow to generate installers for all platforms.

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Additional packages can be installed via Pkg without triggering recompilation of pre-installed packages.

I wonder how this is implemented?

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How does this work with VSCode ?