One of my advisors is considering transitioning towards Julia from a traditional HPC background using C++ and Python. After a couple days playing around, he seems quite impressed by the flexibility of Julia’s type system. But, he hasn’t done any “serious numerical work” (his words), and he is wonder…

[image] ChrisRackauckas: Now change your code to Vector{Float64} if you want to be calling a C library to mutate that object. I tried that in the past and it caused a 10x slowdown of my code.

[image] ufechner7: I tried that in the past and it caused a 10x slowdown of my code. You convert in f, which is what it was doing before.

@adamslc , I am curious. Did your advisor transition to Julia at the end? In either case what was the reasons (pro/cons)?

Thanks. Its really beyond me, looking through the Apache parquet codebase. Maybe you could help out here? Its the Julia community that really makes the language shine.

I already maintain like 40 packages, and don’t use Parquet, so probably thats a no :wink: It was all beyond me at some stage too. (Julia packages are surprisingly easy to start or contribute to, and should be much cleaner than the apache codebase in other languages)

Thanks for the tip @tim.holy Look forward to trying these more friendly tools.

[image] ufechner7: And Makie has breaking changes all the time Yes, me too…

If you never want your code to break, pin the versions. If you like new features, API improvements, and better internals, things break some times. I view that as an advantage, not a problem - new breaking versions often bring awesome features, and fix stuff that seems inconsistent and ankward. It ma…

[image] gitboy16: Did your advisor transition to Julia at the end? He retired! So inconclusive I guess?

What don't you like about Julia for "serious work"?

Community

tim.holy March 8, 2023, 10:16pm 164

Today is your lucky day: [ANN] New tools for fixing performance problems in Julia. It still may not be easy, but hopefully it’s a lot easier!

Topic		Replies	Views
I find it hard to develop in Julia Internals & Design	72	4625	February 14, 2026
Reflections on Developer Experience After Building a Large Julia Codebase General Usage	33	2788	January 11, 2026
Ensure Julia is used to its full power New to Julia question , first-steps	100	7410	December 11, 2020
Julia motivation: why weren't Numpy, Scipy, Numba, good enough? Community history	123	84270	September 21, 2018
Reluctance to switch to Julia; PyPy and Cython General Usage	35	11897	December 10, 2019

What don't you like about Julia for "serious work"?

Related topics