I’ve searched in vain for this. How do I create a binary (preferably statically linked) from .jl files? Does julia have a compiler and linker / class loader? All the introductory material I’ve found so far are for notebooks or simple scripts. Does Julia have build tools? In the Java world there is Maven and Gradle. The Go language comes with its own build tool chain. What does Julia have? A related question is what is the typical way to structure source files for a Julia project?

Static compilation is still in the early stages for Julia. I’ve never tried but my understanding is that it takes some work to accomplish. You could look at StaticCompiler.jl, it may have what you need. As for your second question, if you are asking what is a typical directory structure for a Julia package then you can create one using the generate function. In the REPL enter package mode by typing ] as the first character on the command line. Then type generate followed by the name you want to give the package. It will create a typical package directory. In package mode type ? for help on the commands available. Are you planning to do large scale software development? Check out VSCode if you haven’t already. It’s got good support for Julia coding.

Is a package the way I would create a binary? In Go there’s a typical directory structure with a main package and a func main() as the entry point. Normally there will be multiple other packages as well to create one binary. What would be the entry point in a Julia program with multiple files? Would there be only one package or multiple packages? I would be using Intellij for my IDE which has a Julia plugin (not sure how good it is).

https://pkgdocs.julialang.org/dev/creating-packages/ it depends on what you wanna do. In Julia, users are usually not invoking main() from terminal, so most packages don’t have a “entry point” per-se. People simply do using Upstream1 # or import Upstream2 in their downstream package if they need to.

You might also want to take a look at https://github.com/JuliaLang/PackageCompiler.jl

@brianguenter I really would not at all recommend StaticCompiler.jl or StaticTools.jl to a new user.These packages are still in very early days and are more like proofs of concept than anything. Suggesting them to a new user is just going to end in frustration and wasted time. @DWSchulze first of all, welcome. Julia is not really designed for static compilation. Rather, Julia is more designed around REPL driven interactive workflows. I would strongly suggest you think about whether that’s something you actually need. If you do need static compilation, then I’d recommend looking into PackageCompiler.jl. It is quite reliable, but it takes a long time to compile and also produces very large binaries. But, if you need it for something like sending a binary to another machine, or reducing / eliminating your startup compilation overhead for an important piece of code, then it can be quite useful.

I had just assumed that Julia was a mature language being at v 1.7+. Thanks for setting me straight on that. I’ll do some more work with the Go ecosystem for ML and see how it stacks up against the Julia and Python ecosystems.

Just out of curiosity: Why do you need a compiled binary while doing machine learning? I have a feeling that this might be an instance of the XY problem. For example, if you think that you need to build a binary in order for your code to run at the speed of compiled C or Go, then that’s a misunderstanding. Or if you need to call a Julia routine from some external C code (or vice versa) that is also possible to do without explicitly building a binary.

[image] DWSchulze: I had just assumed that Julia was a mature language being at v 1.7+. Thanks for setting me straight on that. Julia is a mature language. StaticCompiler.jl is a package that is immature.

Notebooks and repls are clunky. I can iterate much faster from an IDE like Intellij. And code laid out as one big script is difficult to test and think about. It’s just bad design.

How do I create a binary from .jl files?

New to Julia

brianguenter May 5, 2022, 6:04am 6

Also check out this discourse thread, StaticTools, about tools for statically compiling Julia.

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How do I create a binary from .jl files?

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