Kodsnack 80 - Where numbers don't have to be special anymore

We chat with Stefan Karpinski, creator of the Julia programming language, live on stage during Øredev 2014. Topics include defiding to build a new language, the interesting unsolved problems of numerical computing, concurrency solutions, developing with and on LLVM, handling deprecation nicely, things (possibly) in the future for Julia and why Swift is exciting for Julia and other languages.

This recording exists as good as it is thanks to Stephen Chin of nighthacking.com for providing and masterfully wrangling all the necessary technology.

There is a minute and a half of worse audio quality just after the nine minute mark, where microphone problems forced us to fill in with audio from our backup microphone.

Comments, thoughts or suggestions? Discuss this episode at Techworld!

• Stefan Karpinski
• Julia programming language
• Scientific computing
• Viral Shah
• Jeff Bezanson
• MATLAB
• R programming language
• Python
• C extension
• Goldilocks
• Goldilocks principle
• Dylan
• Garbage collection
• Unboxed data
• Complex number
• Julia Webstack
• Numerical computing
• Concurrency
• Distributed computing
• Threading
• Julia on Github
• Transactional memory
• Goroutine
• Coroutine
• Channel
• I/O
• LLVM
• IFDEF
• JIT - just-in-time (compilation, in this case)
• Shared library
• libclang - C Interface to Clang
• Template instantiation
• Quake2.jl
• Go
• Hacker school
• Matrix multiplication
• Vectorization
• Generational incremental garbage collection
• SNOBOL
• SPITBOL
• Icon
• Perl 4
• C99 standard
• Immutable composite types
• Multiple dispatch
• Monkey patch
• radd-trick in Python
• Common Lisp
• CLOS - Common Lisp object system
• Polymorphism
• Self
• BLAS - Basic linear algebra subroutines
• Fast fourier transform
• Gofix
• Tracing
• Static compilation
• MIT - Massachusetts institute of technology
• Courses taught using Julia
• Function pointer
• Scipy
• Steven Johnson
• FFTW
• Pycall package for Julia
• Call stack
• GDB
• LLDB
• ABI - application binary interface
• Clang
• Rust programming language
• Swift
• Chris Lattner - creator of LLVM and Swift
• WebKit FTL JIT - compiles Javascript using LLVM
• Shadow stack
• ‎Dynamic stack frame deoptimization
• MATLAB matrix concatenation syntax

• Some of the interesting tradeoffs
• Bridge that gap between high-level and low-level
• A huge pointer graph of some kind
• It’s good to have a focus, initially
• The point where we’re pushing things
• The classic tradition of a ton of IFDEFs
• This brings us back to garbage collection
• Specializing for numerical work
• Where numbers don’t have to be special anymore
• (The question is:) How useful is that generalization?
• You don’t necessarily know what code you’re going to need in advance
• Trading off memory for performance
• Really doing the deprecation process
• A situation where normally you’d JIT something
• You might end up in a slow case
• You can always just fall back on an interpreter
• A partially compiled interpreter
• Nobody needs to know that it was written in Julia
• A really capable C library
• As easy as walking a linked pointer list
• I’m really glad someone else implemented it