julia-02-installation slides

Introduction to the Julia programming language

2 Installing and Running Julia¶

Standard Installation¶

Installing Julia is very easy:

Go to the Julia downloads page
Pick the installer for your platform, use the current stable release
Unpack/install locally

N.B. If you installed a tarball, you might need to add Julia's bin directory to your PATH.

Running Julia¶

$ julia
               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.10.2 (2024-03-01)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |

julia>

You will be to now type Julia commands in a standard REPL environment: read, evaluate, print, loop.

This is an almost exact Julia analogue of Python's ipython.

julia> println("hello, world!")
hello, world!

julia> (2+3)^2
25

julia>

Notebooks¶

Julia will run in a Jupyter notebook environment, e.g., using Jupyter Lab or in VS Code.

Julia Scripts¶

Finally, let's just observe that Julia scripts work just as one would expect:

#! /usr/bin/env julia

function main()
    println("hello, world! let's calculate a sum of squares")

    total = 0
    for i in 1:10
        total += i^2
    end

    println("The answer is $(total)")
end

main()

So let's execute that:

$ julia julia-script.jl
hello, world! let's calculate a sum of squares
The answer is 385

Bonus Installation Method: `juliaup`¶

Another way to manage a Julia install is with Juliaup - a Julia toolkit installation manager inspired by the excellent Rustup for the Rust programming language.

Once installed, you can simply type in a terminal:

juliaup list

to show all the versions of Julia available.

We will work with the newest version on all platforms, 1.9.3 so simply type

juliaup install 1.9.3

to set that up.