We chat with Stefan Karpinski, creator of the Julia programming language, live on stage during Øredev 2014. Topics include deciding to build a new language, the interesting unsolved problems of numerical computing, concurrency solutions, developing with and on LLVM, handling deprecation nicely, things (possibly) in the future for Julia and why Swift is exciting for Julia and other languages.

This recording exists as good as it is thanks to Stephen Chin of nighthacking.com for providing and masterfully wrangling all the necessary technology.

There is a minute and a half of worse audio quality just after the nine minute mark, where microphone problems forced us to fill in with audio from our backup microphone.

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Some of the interesting tradeoffs
Bridge that gap between high-level and low-level
A huge pointer graph of some kind
It’s good to have a focus, initially
The point where we’re pushing things
The classic tradition of a ton of IFDEFs
This brings us back to garbage collection
Specializing for numerical work
Where numbers don’t have to be special anymore
(The question is:) How useful is that generalization?
You don’t necessarily know what code you’re going to need in advance
Trading off memory for performance
Really doing the deprecation process
A situation where normally you’d JIT something
You might end up in a slow case
You can always just fall back on an interpreter
A partially compiled interpreter
Nobody needs to know that it was written in Julia
A really capable C library
As easy as walking a linked pointer list
I’m really glad someone else implemented it

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Kodsnack 80 - Where numbers don't have to be special anymore

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