Workflow Tips

Here are some tips for working with Julia efficiently.

REPL-based workflow

As already elaborated in The Julia REPL, Julia’s REPL provides rich functionality that facilitates an efficient interactive workflow. Here are some tips that might further enhance your experience at the command line.

A basic editor/REPL workflow

The most basic Julia workflows involve using a text editor in conjunction with the julia command line. A common pattern includes the following elements:

• Put code under development in a temporary module. Create a file, say Tmp.jl, and include within it

  module Tmp
  export say_hello
  say_hello() = println("Hello!")
  # your other definitions here
  end

• Put your test code in another file. Create another file, say tst.jl, which looks like

  include("Tmp.jl")
  import .Tmp
  # using .Tmp # we can use `using` to bring the exported symbols in `Tmp` into our namespace
  Tmp.say_hello()
  # say_hello()
  # your other test code here

  and includes tests for the contents of Tmp. Alternatively, you can wrap the contents of your test file in a module, as

  module Tst
      include("Tmp.jl")
      import .Tmp
      #using .Tmp
      Tmp.say_hello()
      # say_hello()
      # your other test code here
  end

  The advantage is that your testing code is now contained in a module and does not use the global scope in Main for definitions, which is a bit more tidy.

• include the tst.jl file in the Julia REPL with include("tst.jl").

• Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Explore ideas at the julia command prompt. Save good ideas in tst.jl. To execute tst.jl after it has been changed, just include it again.

Browser-based workflow

It is also possible to interact with a Julia REPL in the browser via IJulia. See the package home for details.