This month in Julia world - 2024-01

Jan 31st 2024 Krastanov writes:

A monthly newsletter, mostly on julia internals, digestible for casual observers. A biased, incomplete, editorialized list of what I found interesting this month, with contributions from the community.

“Internals” Fora and Core Repos (Slack/Zulip/Discourse/Github):

• Julia 1.10 was released around Christmass. See the release highlights.
• It seems we all agree that it would be incredibly valuable to have better ways to call julia from inside python. This discourse thread has plenty of discussion on the topic, but specifically check out Chris’s comments which has a bunch of constructive suggestions towards the end.
• Rounding operations on Complex numbers (into presumably complex integers) are pretty difficult to do consistently. On the issue tracker folks have been discussing various ways to do it, and the dangers of being too permissive in what interfaces might emerge by accident. It is not feasible to summarize the entire story, as the thread is a bit meandering and has some contextual miscommunications, but a valuable read nonetheless. Arbitrarily, consider starting with this comment.
• A lot of ongoing discussion in various places on how to deal with asynchronous exceptions (interrupts from the outside or stack overflows, that can happen at much weirder ill-defined times compared usual exceptions). This is a good starting point for the discussion. There are comments with interesting references to how other languages deal with this as well.
• Now that we have a public keyword, people are thinking about how to better protect (or mark as sensitive) package internals, to avoid accidental dependencies on unstable implementation details.
• A wonderful explanation of how “world splitting” used to be a great optimization in the compiler that can now lead to invalidating large amounts of code, cause recompilation, and de-optimization. The thread as a whole has other useful pieces of wisdom, but it is a bit meandering.
• A wonderful case study in fixing method invalidations and compilation latency (using Pkg.jl as an example). See this related older post on similar topics.
• An interesting discussion on the idiosyncrasies of computing type intersections (the set of types that are at the same time subtypes of two given types) in Julia. The operation is not commutative.
• Fun examples of how the update to a new LLVM is now changing the loop unrolling behavior (occasionally to detrimental effects) on slack and github

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