Julia Notable Uses

[Palli]

It’s getting even more possible to run Julia on an actual satellite. I.e. with StaticCompiler.jl (and possibly, or not helping?):

[ANN] StaticTools.jl: Enabling StaticCompiler.jl-based compilation of Julia code to standalone native binaries by avoiding GC allocations and `llvmcall`-ing all the things

Technically this one has been registered for a couple months already, but we never made an announcement, so here goes! GitHub - brenhinkeller/StaticTools.jl: Enabling StaticCompiler.jl-based compilation of (some) Julia code to standalone native binaries by avoiding GC allocations and llvmcall-ing all the things! I’ve just released version 0.3, which brings a lot of major changes. While it’s still a somewhat experimental package, I think it’s at least to some extent ready for other folks to use,…

Limitations:

In order to be standalone-compileable without linking to libjulia, you need to avoid (among probably other things):

• GC allocations. Manual heap-allocation (malloc, calloc) and stack allocation (by convincing the Julia compiler to use alloca and put your object on the stack) are all fine though.
• […]
• Multithreading
• Microsoft Windows (not supported by StaticCompiler yet), except via WSL

Not running on Windows, is maybe a feature, not a bug for satellite control. And not having GC allocations is a feature for embedded/real-time/satellites. It’s already possible to avoid GC with Julia before all this, but you had huge binaries. Now the smallest are under 9 KB, and while you can use malloc instead of GC, you would also want to not do that in your control loop.