First impression of Julia 1.14-alpha

General Usage
1

Comparing the load times of MTK I get:

  • 4.0s with Julia 1.13.2
  • 3.17s with Julia 1.14+opt

This is a 21% improvement.

The time-to-first-plot (TTFP) with MakieControlPlots shows an even larger improvement:

Julia 1.13.2:

julia> @time @eval (using MakieControlPlots; plotx([1,2,3], rand(3)))
  3.389415 seconds (6.05 M allocations: 381.920 MiB, 13.21% gc time, 15.29% compilation time)

Julia 1.14+opt:

julia> @time @eval (using MakieControlPlots; plotx([1,2,3], rand(3)))
  2.426261 seconds (3.49 M allocations: 286.406 MiB, 14.88% gc time, 9.39% compilation time)

This is a 29% improvement.

Congrats to the developers! :slight_smile:

2

Big shout out to @ianshmean and @kristoffer.carlsson, who have been doing a lot of great work on TTFX.

3

Out of curiosity, what do you get if you set the env var

JULIA_OBJCACHE=0

before starting Julia?

4

A little bit slower, but not much:

export JULIA_OBJCACHE=0; julia +1.14+opt

julia> @time @eval (using MakieControlPlots; plotx([1,2,3], rand(3)))
  2.544094 seconds (3.49 M allocations: 286.391 MiB, 14.28% gc time, 14.67% compilation time)

compared to 2.39s with objcache.

5

I run a longer test that creates a new system image with 530 packages. You can use the following script to reproduce the test:

#!/bin/bash -eu

# Clone the julia-1.14 branch of KiteControllers into /tmp/test and use a new, empty Julia depot
# in /tmp, install it with bin/install, create a system image with bin/create_sys_image and
# run examples/autopilot.jl with this image in precompile mode (a 30 s simulation, then the
# plot selected in the menu). Needs a display and at least 30 GB of RAM + swap.
# Use test/test_installation to test the installation without a system image.

rm -rf /tmp/testdepot
mkdir /tmp/testdepot
rm -rf /tmp/test
git clone --depth 1 -b julia-1.14 https://github.com/OpenSourceAWE/KiteControllers.jl /tmp/test
cd /tmp/test
export JULIA_DEPOT_PATH=/tmp/testdepot
bin/install
bin/create_sys_image -y
julia_major=$(julia --startup-file=no -e 'print(VERSION.major, ".", VERSION.minor)')
julia --project -t auto -J "bin/kps-image-${julia_major}.so" \
    -e 'using KiteControllers; __PRECOMPILE__ = true; include("examples/autopilot.jl")'

It needs:

  • on Julia 1.13.2 21m57s
  • on Julia 1.14-opt 16m46s

Much better, about 24%. Looking forward to the release!

6

Based on news.md, appears to be a really exciting release all around!! Great stuff!

7

@ufechner7 PackageCompiler actually has slowed down a fair bit since 1.11, but there’s some PRs that just went in to regain most of that ground. Worth trying tomorrow’s nightly (once the builds are out)