You may have already heard about Julia. Well, I am not (yet) a regular user but Julia’s performances are impressive, the langage is well-thought and the community is growing super fast, I therefore pay careful attention to what’s happening on their side. Recently, version 1.0.0 was released, so I decided to replace my local version v0.4.7.9 I installed with apt-get (note that currently v0.7.0-2 is available for Sid).

There are two ways to install Julia for Debian without apt-get. First one is to go on the website and download the Generic Linux Binaries for x86. Second is to follow the guidelines on the README file of the Github repository to compile Julia from sources. That is what I did, starting by cloning the repository:

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git clone https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia.git

This took a couple of seconds, then I switched to version 1:

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git checkout v1.0.0

And then, I used the makefile:

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make

It took some time:

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REPL  ───────────  1.126812 seconds
Statistics  ─────  0.311747 seconds
Stdlibs total  ── 65.668191 seconds
Sysimage built. Summary:
Total ───────  88.168324 seconds
Base: ───────  22.498423 seconds 25.5176%
Stdlibs: ────  65.668191 seconds 74.4805%
    JULIA usr/lib/julia/sys-o.a
Generating precompile statements... 762 generated in  37.767039 seconds
    LINK usr/lib/julia/sys.so
    CC usr/lib/libccalltest.so
>>> elapsed time 1h18m10s

1h18m10s! As mentioned on the README: “Building Julia requires about 5GiB of disk space and approximately 2GiB of virtual memory”. After the build, ./julia worked just fine and to ease my use of Julia, I added an alias in my .zprofile:

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alias julia='~/Github/Applications/julia/julia'

So, now when I enter julia in my terminal, I get:

Youhou! 🎆 🔥 🌟 🎆 🔥 🌟