I want to to use Julia to create plots from data generated by an externally compiled program written in another language. I am on macOS Monterey using Julia 1.8.3. I want to control Julia from within the external program. Due to Julia’s time-to-plot issues and the large number of plots I expect to make, I would like to start a single Julia session and then send commands to it later, from the external program. The commands might be one-liners or stored in a file.
The language of the external program is not C but it has a binding to C’s System call by which I can send shell commands by simply appending a null character to the string of the command.
i have used this method to great success with a commercial program (Igor Pro) but I fear that Igor Pro is nearing end-of-life on macOS, thus my desire to change my workflow. The process is for the external program to write the plot data as double-precision floats to a file, then direct Igor via System to read and plot the data.
I have installed Plots and several of its backends as well as GLMakie so I am able to make plots from within Julia itself, including notebooks in VS Code and the VSC-Julia plot pane.
I have tried several things but am not progressing to a solution.
Igor Pro lets me access it by a command-line capability somehow built into its executable. This is fantastic. Can I do this with Julia? If so, how do I direct my commands to the “right” Julia since there sometimes seems to be several Julias running at once.
I suspect that I can achieve my goal by another method: by setting up a pipe to be read by the running Julia instance, then send Julia commands to the pipe from my external program using the System binding. Is this correct? How would I do this? (At this point, it is best to address me as an intelligent fifth-grader because I am not fluent in these things.)
A terrific bonus would be to be able to somehow send commands to Julia as it exists within a VS Code session, either a regular .jl file with its plotting pane or a Julia .ipynb notebook.
If you want to use a similar tool to what you are doing now you might look at DaemonMode.jl, this allows a persistent Julia session to be used to run scripts that are started independently.
Another approach would be to communicate with a Julia REPL through libexpect, which I believe is available on OS X though I don’t know for sure.
I think you’re on the right track with your pipe idea. I haven’t tried this approach with Julia, but it’s worked for me elsewhere: write your Julia program as if it were interacting with a user at the terminal, but use the Sockets package to communicate through a socket instead. Then your C program just needs to send commands over the socket to the port opened by the Julia program. You’ll distinguish among programs by their port numbers.
Awesome help! Thanks. DaemonMode.jl gives me the result that I was looking for. After setting up the background shell-initiated Julia process, I can send it arbitrary Julia files from either a second shell or from the System command bound to my language. (The language is Ada but I didn’t want to distract with that information in my original post.) I suspect that DaemonMode.jl uses the TCP idea to get its work done.
However, this all seems like a PITA and weirdly after a while of things working, some stuff stopped working. Something in my Julia infrastructure seemed to break. So I decided to go the Python route. After studying the Python plotting alternatives I decided to go with Plotly. Learning Plotly was a pain especially since that community treats surface plots as second-class citizens and their API is goofy (and the documenting web site goofier). But it’s done and now I have a very quick-response plotter that puts beautiful plots into my browser using WebGL and with useful panning and zooming controls. Pretty nice.
Maybe some day Julia will grow up and be able to remember what it did 30 seconds ago (i.e., not have to compile static code over and over).