Experience report after finishing a (reasonably substantial) Julia project in 2024

[abraemer]

I definitively can understand and partially share some of these concerns/pain points. I’ll need to think a bit more about all of that.

For now let me point out two things that are incorrect:

First:

@rongcuid

Take the following example:

# a.jl
function curvature(...)
end

# b.jl
function some_other_function()
...
    curvature = ...
end

Well, apparently after this executes, curvature’s definition is overwritten, and every other code is broken.

As written this is false. The local assignment in some_other_function does not overwrite the global curvature. In your case you must have done something differently.

Second:

@rongcuid

The main problem is that, Julia code can break due to the order of definition. With this scheme of direct include, the order of inclusion critical. In fact, plenty of errors I encountered were due to seemingly unrelated code in another file. Especially if somewhere there’s an unmatched end, I could have to go through every single file, spotting line by line, manually, to fix an error that’s reported nowhere close to its origin. Due to how include works, the scope of an unclosed end could leek beyond file boundary, and cause problem somewhere completely unexpected.

This also seems wrong as written. In contrast to C include is not a macro replacing itself with the contents of another file but a function that evaluates some julia file. As such that Julia file needs to be syntactically correct. E.g. you cannot include the following:

module WontInclude
foo(x) = x^2
#no end for module