Does Julia libraries exists?

It may be stupid noob question. I watched Low Level Learning episode Why rust libraries may never exist, which say something like that. Normal C library is external binary that we can linked in different ways, to use with our program. In Rust you don’t have things like that. Instead you have a heap of source code that you steal from repo…, ackhm, download for reuse and then compile alongside with your own code to assure that all type system and things like that requirements are satisfied.

It a bit of shame, but I don’t know how this work in Julia. I guess it is similar to situation with Rust, but can’t be sure. I watched talk What’s the deal with Julia binary sizes?, but I didn’t understand it well enough to answer this question for myself.

The title of the linked video is click bait, meant to be provocative but (grossly) inaccurate. Source-level libraries and binary libraries are both libraries. And I think Julia does have plans for distributing precompiled binaries.

I haven’t watched the video, but from your description it sounds like complete nonsense. It’s definitely possible to create a shared library in Rust, and doing so is well documented (you’ll have to reference other parts of the book as well, but that page should get you started). It’s also possible in Julia (but probably not as common or as well-supported). See this page of PackageCompiler.jl’s docs to get started with creating a shared lib in Julia.

6 Likes