Julia + elixir

There is Julia for those kinds of things.

OK, I’m slightly biased because I came to Elixir directly from Julia because I didn’t think Julia had a “deploying real user-facing things” story despite being 1.0… maybe I’m the only one, ha.

Julia matches extremely well with the academic mindset and the mindset of machine learning professionals (even though some of them don’t know it yet), which is why it’s in the beginning stages of blowing up in that field. It also meshes really well with elixir in terms of its programming paradigms (functional, escape hatches for statefulness, capitalized modules, secretly a lisp). I think stronger julia ↔ elixir interop is a thing that could be really amazing, and is currently an unsolved problem. I also know that there have been lots of rumblings in the elixir community about wanting this…

I only started learning Julia a few days ago. So far, I think it is good at what it is supposed to be good at, not much for other things. For one the core api documentation is no as easy to navigate as elixir’s.

I wholeheartedly agree better interop between elixir and julia would be beneficial to both communites.

I think (I haven’t tested this out) that running Julia as C-Node would be fairly straightforward.

I would love to see really strong Julia interop and for Julia to adopt Elixir’s expectations/standards for high-quality documentation and tooling. Those two languages compliment each other really well. But I also agree that a lot of the user base is usually happy to just hack something together in Python and call it a day. An Elixir/Julia alternative could possibly occupy a niche for applications that need to be durable and therefore more thoughtfully engineered.

Why should we care? Really. This is all on the “Julia developer” side, not on “Elixir developer” side.

If such integration would use UNIX sockets for communication instead of C-Node (fairly easy to do with socket module) then one could pass mmaped FD to the second process. However IIRC this is still not available on Windows (even with introduction of UNIX socket on Windows).

Seems interesting. You can count me in.

I feel like for many questions one can also look at things like rustler for how integration with elixir/mix/rebar3 can look like.

Well im also the author of zigler, so this won’t be my first rodeo with elixir language interop.

Why should we care? Really. This is all on the “Julia developer” side, not on “Elixir developer” side.

I think if you’re going to want to write an app that you deploy somewhere “in prod”, you are not going to want to struggle with, say virtualenvs. I’ve discussed this with the Julia founders, and honestly, the current Julia deploy strategy for solving this is “just containerize it”. Since Elixir is the more opinionated system, and acting as the ‘orchestrator’ anyways, I think it’s reasonable to take the position that in a mixed language deployment, (that will necessarily have to share container, for example), Elixir should be the “responsible parent” and manage those sorts of things. I think julia has an escape hatch where you can set the deps path, so forcing julia deps into the elixir project tree is “the right thing”.

Agreed. Just don’t make it overly complicated and hidden. Also if people want to stick to the global setting of the Julia environment they should be able to opt out of this.