Julia vs. D?

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 14:57:36 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 12:05:10 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 7 May 2014 at 09:16:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 23:19:47 UTC, Mason McGill wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, 6 May 2014 at 11:28:21 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>>>> Maybe it's time to think about a D interface to Julia. If 
>>>>> Julia catches on within the scientific community, it would 
>>>>> be good to have a foot in the door. Science quickly creates 
>>>>> large code bases, unfortunately, so far it's mostly Python 
>>>>> and Matlab which makes it hard to use the algorithms in 
>>>>> real world applications.
>>>>
>>>> I've actually been working on just that, on and off for a 
>>>> few months now. Such a thing is kind of "anti-Julian", 
>>>> though, since one of Julia's main goals is to reduce or 
>>>> eliminate the need for mixed-language projects.
>>>>
>>>> However, with D, you can compile small shared libraries that 
>>>> can be automatically bound to your users' favorite dynamic 
>>>> runtimes (via compile-time reflection). I'm hoping this will 
>>>> be good for both D and Julia, allowing library developers to 
>>>> reach a broader audience, and library consumers greater 
>>>> flexibility.
>>>>
>>>> I'll post on the D "announce" thread when I have something 
>>>> working, and I'd definitely appreciate tests/bug-reports at 
>>>> that time!
>>>
>>> I was also thinking in the direction of enabling D to use 
>>> existing Julia code seamlessly, so you can just call it from 
>>> D (extern(J)), and maybe even efficiently compile it into 
>>> binaries along with D code, as you would with extern(C) calls 
>>> now.
>>
>> It's really easy to do that with R. There is a package RInside 
>> that makes it trivial to embed R in a C++ program, and it's 
>> not difficult to use with D.
>
> Would be cool if we had something like this for Julia (if it 
> really catches on).

I guess you can call D from Julia very easily via the C API and 
would just need to declare C calling convention in your D code.  
It may be that with a combination of Julia and D one has the best 
of both  worlds - no compromise with speed and efficient resource 
use on the number crunching with a nice shell / Ipython notebook 
that is still pretty fast on the front end.

Nicer would be a wrapper a la PyD that seamlessly translates 
between types.

Then the other thing is to translate julia.h into D so that you 
can embed Julia.  That's a little work but not so hard.  More 
about how this works with C here:

http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.3/manual/embedding/