Julia v1.0 builds for 64-bit ARM?

General Usage
1

Just a quick question, will there be official 64-bit ARM (armv8-a) builds of Julia v1.0?

Cheers,

Oliver

2

The ARM build is currently not working and until that isn’t fixed there won’t be official binaries.
Hopefully something we can fix in an upcoming version alongside bringing support for PowerPC back.

Contributions are always welcome! (see https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/labels/arm for a list of known issues)

3

Yes, support for PowerPC is important. Not many people have access to it (I’m not a PowerPC user myself) but the problem I see is this: Some HPC clusters are on power (e.g. the top two systems on the TOP500 list) and the future direction this will go is hard to predict. Some people may hesitate to invest themselves in Julia if there is a even a risk that they could want to run on such a system in the future, but can’t fully trust right now that they’ll be able to. HPC codes are often long lived and so users and developers (and their bosses and funding sources) tend to be quite conservative in such matters.

4

Perhaps they should pay for someone (Julia Computing?) to maintain it, or contribute by doing it.

5

Sure - I certainly wasn’t trying to cause undue pressure here, I know the core team is very busy with lot’s of pressing issues. I just wanted to mention that long-term it’ll make Julia more acceptable for HPC software stacks if there’s an official “PowerPC supported” stamp on it.

As for funding, I fully agree with you in principle. But the problem is that when is comes to science, who does the work, who pays for it and who makes the decisions regarding software stacks are often a lot less correlated than in industry … :wink:

6

Current Status:

Now ARM builds exists on Download Julia

  • v.1.0.3 - ARM 64-bit (AArch64)
  • v.1.0.3 - ARM 32-bit (ARMv7-a hard float)

Support Level: GitHub - JuliaLang/julia: The Julia Programming Language

  • Linux 2.6.18+
    • ARM v7 (32-bit) : Tier 2
      * ( “Tier 2: Julia is guaranteed to build from source using default build options, but may or may not pass all tests. Official binaries are available on a case-by-case basis.” )
    • ARM v8 (64-bit) : Tier 3
      * ( “Tier 3: Julia may or may not build. If it does, it is unlikely to pass tests.”)
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