What's next?

As Julia is a new language, there are relatively few resources for learning it.

Useful learning resources are:

Leah Hanson's blog, with well-written explanations: http://blog.leahhanson.us/category/julia.html
Learn Julia in a few minutes: http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/julia/

There are a couple of books on Julia in preparation.

The main reference manual is

The Julia Manual: http://julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manual/

The best place to get help with any problems is the julia-users Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users

The talks from the first JuliaCon conference should be online soon: http://juliacon.org/

Packages

Probably the easiest way to get started with Julia is to find a package which implements functionality of interest to you and start reading the source code.

A rather random selection of interesting packages:

DataStructures.jl: data structures
Lazy.jl: functional programming
JuMP: optimization library with domain-specific language for defining problems
TaylorSeries: $n$-dimensional Taylor series manipulation (I'm a minor co-author)

Parallel processing

Julia was designed with various types of support for parallel processing. Launching Julia with julia -p 4 will run Julia with 4 parallel threads. The @parallel macro does the necessary:



In [1]:

    
nheads = @parallel (+) for i=1:200000000
  int(randbool())
end









    Out[1]:





100001758



In [ ]:

    
Pkg.update()



In [ ]:

For instance, the ParallelSparseMatMul.jl package uses this to do sparse matrix multiplication in parallel: https://github.com/madeleineudell/ParallelSparseMatMul.jl