Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

https://juliazoid.com/heres-why-startups-are-building-with-the-julia-programming-language-5addadac3bdc

by leephillips • 4 years ago

47 41 4 years ago

ubj• 4 years ago

If anyone from these startups is here on HN, I would love to hear your thoughts on the following:

1. How are you dealing with TTFX when deploying your code? If using PackageCompiler/StaticCompiler, is binary size an issue?

2. Are you using solely Julia, or a combination of Julia + other languages?

3. What unique value is Julia offering your startup that is difficult to find in other languages?

logankilpatrick4• 4 years ago

When I worked at Beacon biosignals briefly in 2020, they had Simon Danish (the creator of Makie there full time deploying plots/makie in the browser).

One point 2, you should check out Julius Tech which is bridging the multi language future using Julia through their graph computing tool. Other companies like RelationalAI are building on top of Julia but also have their own new language called Rel.

Loic• 4 years ago

TTFX - the time-to-first whatever a package does most[0].

[0] https://discourse.julialang.org/t/taking-ttfx-seriously-can-...

thetwentyone2• 4 years ago

Jumping the gun slightly, but TTFX likely about to get a lot better (5x+ improvement in times) in the next version (1.9). Via cachine of the native compiled code.

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/47184#issuecomment-1...

CyberDildonics3• 4 years ago

I've been hearing about improvements for the last 8 years. It has been a constant complaint and a constant broken promise.

etik• 4 years ago

We (metalenz.com) use Julia extensively in our optical design/simulation/modeling workflows:

1. Design team keeps live sessions during interactive work, otherwise launches on virtualized servers (and things take sufficiently long to compute TTFX is a rounding error)

2. Above mentioned team is exclusively Julia. Julia shows up in other things we do (low-level computer vision), but not dominant nor exclusive

3. High performance & expressive programming and flexible autodiff system for scientific computation

philip1209• 4 years ago

My defunct startup Staffjoy operated from 2015 to 2017 and was an early production user of Julia. We open-sourced some of the code here: https://github.com/staffjoy

I haven't kept up with the ecosystem - I'm curious how things have improved in the last 5 year!

leephillips3• 4 years ago

Probably the most obvious improvements for most users are the big growth in the package ecosystem, with some science and math packages becoming the best available in any language (DifferentialEquations.jl, for example) and the drastic improvement in interactivity: the REPL starts instantly now, and most packages compile much faster. This will get even better in the next major release.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m• 4 years ago

I’m curious (I’m planning on designing an ODE/PDE package relatively soon), what makes DifferentialEquations.jl the best available?

open-source-ux• 4 years ago

Julia scientific apps and libraries continue to grow and see momentum. Is there interest in Julia outside the scientifc sphere? I'd be interested to hear of non-scientific projects implemented in Julia (for example, business apps or web-related projects.)

Related: I think Julia is an excellent starting language (compared to Python). Is anyone teaching Julia to new programmers with success?

logankilpatrick4• 4 years ago

Look at GenieCloud, they are essentially building the Django ecosystem in Julia, it will be huge if they are successful.

cbkeller• 4 years ago

I'm teaching an intro programming course (discipline-specific, for Earth sciences) in Julia at Dartmouth. So far so good I think -- but definitely on the sciences side of things.

vHMtsdf3• 4 years ago

I heard a talk from a large cybersecurity company that was using Julia for research and is apparently in the process of dropping Julia due to: - difficulty in hiring, apparently it was too expensive/difficult to hire Julia programmers, - poorly performing garbage collector. If I recall correctly, they had issues when trying to process huge amounts of data.

Seems like small teams will not run into these issues at least initially.

I really like Julia and I hope it becomes huge, but stories like this make me wonder whether the whole Julia ecosystem will ever mature to a level of Python for example. And in turn, making it viable for large organizations that might be using e.g. Python + C++ combo that might be easier to hire for/more versatile/with better known drawbacks.

Essentially, I am not sure whether the potential of Julia is that much greater than the realized potential of the incumbents to warrant the "Julia is the language of the future".

logankilpatrick4• 4 years ago

Please put them in touch with me if possible. RelationalAI has similar GC issues which they are the core Julia developers are working hard to resolve.

I have also seen zero postings for Julia roles in cyber security companies so it is likely that they aren't tapping into the community which is why they can't find people.

vHMtsdf3• 4 years ago

It was a talk by folks from this team: https://gradient.avast.io/people-behind/

europeanguy• 4 years ago

If you care about performance your code shouldn't be allocating.

warinukraine• 4 years ago

My (more or less extensive) experience with Julia has been rather good.

Step 1. Prototyping. Small data, don't care about performance. Julia is as easy as python, but faster. GC doesn't matter.

Step 2. Production. Very large datasets. Performance is very important so I make sure that hot loops don't allocate, and so GC doesn't matter.

Really, I struggle to see how someone can not like this.

Regarding hiring. My experience has been that you can roughly divide people into two categories. Those who like using tools, and those who like solving problems. For the former, a different language might be an issue because they might not know and might not be in the mood for learning it. For the latter, they're happy to learn any tool that can help solve their problem. We want the latter, and for the latter learning Julia hasn't been an issue.

vHMtsdf3• 4 years ago

I am not exactly sure what they were working on, but I am not convinced that any code can be made non-allocating easily.

For example, when you are building large trees with complex structures in the nodes and you need to both add/remove the nodes, the effort to make it non-allocating might be too much compared to just using C++ and writing things more naturally?

dartharva• 4 years ago

How good is Julia as a general-purpose language? Can it be a viable replacement for, say, Lua in game development?

DougBTX• 4 years ago

Julia is a very nice language, its core abstractions (mutli-dispatch and macros) are not tied to any particular use-case. My overriding feeling using it is that it is a language visiting from the future, it is very well put together. Having said that, I've not had the opportunity to use it in production, Python is very popular!

ModernMech• 4 years ago

My overriding feeling using it is that it is a language visiting from the future

Either that, or most languages used today are stuck in the past!

affinepplan• 4 years ago

It is a very well-designed language for many (although of course not all) applications. Most of the ecosystem revolves around scientific computing so you may find there is a bit of a learning curve / sparse existing libraries if you want to use it for game development.

Also, on the language side, Julia is optimized for total throughput, which means even though it is easy to write extremely fast code, it sometimes suffers latency issues during stop-the-world garbage collection or JIT compilation. Julia gives the experienced developer tools to avoid this, but especially for those less practiced with the language it could potentially be an obstacle for real-time games like FPS--of course if you are developing a turn-based game this is less of a concern.

maria2• 4 years ago

Isn't Lua's main benefit that it has a small runtime that can be executed inside the context of a large C/C++ executable? Julia has support for C FFI, but it looks like you'd have to manually wrap all of your native code in Julia wrappers.

One library I've really liked for this use case is QuickJS. It's a super small ES2020 implementation written in C. It has a great API that lets you bind native C functions and types into JavaScript functions, objects, and classes. This lets you bind native C code that gets used naturally in JavaScript without needing to write wrappers.

CyberDildonics3• 4 years ago

Julia is not a good choice to replace lua because its runtime is at least 60MB. It is also very slow to compile. LuaJIT would be a much better choice since it is very small and very fast.

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

Luajit isn't really a replacement for lua though, if you don't want to use lua.

The only thing I've seen that's really comparable to lua/luajit in terms of size and simplicity of embedding in a C program is janet. It's bigger but still a single file. I would assume also somewhat slower but if you need raw perf C is right there.... But you get a much more usable language with an actual stdlib so it's a good tradeoff for a lot of applications.

eigenspace• 4 years ago

I'm a huge julia fan, but man is this ever an insubstantial and unconvincing listicle.

sundarurfriend• 4 years ago

Yeah, it doesn't really seem intended for a HN type audience. More of a high level overview of the language to show to a non-technical co-founder or senior executive.

markkitti2• 4 years ago

What is the HN type audience? HN is a news feed run by Ycombinator, a "startup accelerator". While many people around here have deep technical expertise, given the name "Hacker News", I always thought the main purpose was to make news and technical discussions more accessible to non-technical co-founders and startup executives.

Startups are building with the Julia Programming Language

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