juliac Is Really Great! The juliac compiler that is in development is such a great idea! I highly recommend checking out the blog post by @jbytecode here: juliac on a starters guide for getting started with juliac usage! What we uniquely did here was contribute with showing how to make ccallable functions work within juliac.
Language Interoperability Is Possible with Small Binaries. After much tinkering and exploring, we figured out how to make a small binary that could be executed from within C++ (I’ll let Morten comment more on that!) which evaluated as expected. But what was quite exciting is that after a bunch more tinkering, we got the small binaries to be callable (and usable) from within Julia and R languages!
The Future of juliac Is Exciting! I would say right now, it is still a bit tricky to write juliac compatible code (i.e. type stability, how to use the Julia C/C++ interfaces, write the interface to these binaries from different languages) but there is a lot of richness here. I think we are now at a new frontier for a deeper level of language interoperability that will see Julia proliferate across other ecosystems. I’ll let others comment here!
There is so much to be done here! Alas, I am going to be busy for the next week or so so probably won’t be able to get back to this soon, but I wanted to write up my thoughts and findings here before I am sucked into other research and coursework endeavors again.
Cheers and please let me know your thoughts and ideas!
Maybe it’s too early to ask, but what’s a good workflow, when using juliac, to link against a shared library from a JLL package and deploy the compiled binary with proper environments (e.g., LD_LIBARARY_PATH) for the dependencies?
In a complicated projedct with juliac, will you need a build system like Make or CMake? Or will it be more like a usual Julia package workflow with Project.toml and Manifest.toml?
We were working on kernal smoothing and gibbs examples but the bugs we were getting made us go even simpler to start with. I’m sure we can add an update once we can get back to those.
I tried using this today, and had to deal with a few issues. Firstly, the juliac.jl file in the repo wouldnt work with the --experimental flag so I used the juliac.jl in the nightly installation ~/.julia/juliaup/julia-nightly/share/julia/juliac.jl instead. That did output simple.so, but then I got the following erros:
In R when run as LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. LD_PRELOAD=simple.so R I get this:
> dyn.load("simple.so")
ERROR: could not load symbol "jl_image_pointers":
dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, jl_image_pointers): symbol not found
In julia run as LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. LD_PRELOAD=simple.so julia --startup-file=no, and the same if i use +nightly:
julia> @ccall "simple.so".add_julia(2::Cint, 2::Cint)::Cint
ERROR: could not load library "simple.so"
dlopen(simple.so, 0x0001): Symbol not found: _ijl_gc_small_alloc
Referenced from: <2E082EC4-2052-3A30-96D2-BE77FF5A4F95> /Users/ajinkya/projects/julia_repos/julia-c-r-interface/simple.so
Expected in: <62118962-B36D-3E98-9107-BA557C947AAD> /Users/ajinkya/.julia/juliaup/julia-1.11.3+0.aarch64.apple.darwin14/lib/julia/libjulia-internal.1.11.3.dylib
Stacktrace:
[1] top-level scope
@ ./REPL[1]:1
Any idea what might fix this? I am guessing something just changed since this is under rapid development
Using the repo I posted, make sure to check out your Julia version to that specific commit I referenced if you want to see everything working as I had it. I know things are developing rapidly so I am certain something broke or changed.
I would strongly advise opening an issue about this on the Julia repository and cite my repo and this post here as a reference. To me, it does seem like an element in the pipeline has changed but I am uncertain how to address it.
