Here are some tips for working with Julia efficiently.
As already elaborated in Interacting With Julia, Julia’s REPL provides rich functionality that facilitates an efficient interactive workflow. Here are some tips that might further enhance your experience at the command line.
The most basic Julia workflows involve using a text editor in conjunction with the julia
command line. A common pattern includes the following elements:
Put code under development in a temporary module. Create a file, say Tmp.jl
, and include within it
module Tmp <your definitions here> end
Put your test code in another file. Create another file, say tst.jl
, which begins with
import Tmp
and includes tests for the contents of Tmp
. The value of using import
versus using
is that you can call reload
("Tmp")
instead of having to restart the REPL when your definitions change. Of course, the cost is the need to prepend Tmp.
to uses of names defined in your module. (You can lower that cost by keeping your module name short.)
Alternatively, you can wrap the contents of your test file in a module, as
module Tst using Tmp <scratch work> end
The advantage is that you can now do using
Tmp
in your test code and can therefore avoid prepending Tmp.
everywhere. The disadvantage is that code can no longer be selectively copied to the REPL without some tweaking.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Explore ideas at the julia
command prompt. Save good ideas in tst.jl
. Occasionally restart the REPL, issuing
reload("Tmp") include("tst.jl")
To simplify restarting the REPL, put project-specific initialization code in a file, say _init.jl
, which you can run on startup by issuing the command:
julia -L _init.jl
If you further add the following to your .juliarc.jl
file
isfile("_init.jl") && include(joinpath(pwd(), "_init.jl"))
then calling julia
from that directory will run the initialization code without the additional command line argument.
It is also possible to interact with a Julia REPL in the browser via IJulia. See the package home for details.
© 2009–2016 Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and other contributors
Licensed under the MIT License.
http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.5/manual/workflow-tips/