To those who regularly write Julia code, what is your workflow? The whole thing with Revise.jl did not suit me honestly. I have enjoyed programming in Rust orders of magnitude more because there's no run time and you can do AOT. My intention is not write scripts, but high performance numerical/scientific code, and with Julia's JIT-based design, rapid iteration (to me at least) feels slower than Rust (!).
Nowadays I often use Claude Code, working with a Julia REPL in a tmux or zellij session via send-keys. I'll have it prototype and try to optimize an algorithm there, then create a notebook to "present its results", then I'll take the bits I like and add them to the production codebase.
REPL-based workflow doesn't make sense to me other than scripting work.
For long-running jobs, I basically follow the same process as in any other language: make the functions I want to run, test them locally on a small dataset that runs relatively quickly, then launch them on the remote machines with the full data.
Revise.jl has struct redefinition now, but before that I would just use NamedTuples while iterating, then make a struct when I was ready to move something to production.
`using` is for importing modules, `include` is for specific files. At work, we currently have a monorepo, with one top-level OurProject.jl file that uses `using` to import external packages, and `include` for all the internal files.
The main strategy is to have a way of parameterize the program to bring the runtime down to seconds-minutes on a laptop. E.G. for PDEs, you may be running the HPC version on a giant mesh, but you can run the same algorithm on your local computer on a much coarser mesh.
> How do you quickly modify struct definitations
Thankfully on 1.12 this has been solved. You can redefine structs while keeping the REPL up.
> how do you define imports (using vs include syntax is so confusing!)
Yeah julia messed this up. The basic rule is that include and using are basically the same.
In my experience you really gotta work with the tools the language gives you. Julia gives you Revise, so it’s a bit of a handicap not using it. Maybe analogous to writing Rust without an LSP.
I get that leaning on the LSP can become a habit, and also that the Julia LSP is quite poor, but I find it wild that rapid iteration for you is faster in Rust. I write Rust as well and can’t imagine how that would be the case.
rust-analyzer is a great LSP and paired with clippy it can teach you the language itself. Also, writing numerical code is extremely easy in Rust. I can write code and just run cargo run to see the output. Julia, on the other hand, forced a REPL-based workflow which never has made sense to me. REPL-based workflow makes sense when you just want to do some script stuff. But when writing a code which will run for a long duration on a HPC? I don't get it. Part of the problem is I'm not "holding it correctly", but again, out of the box experience isn't good. You define a struct and later add or remove a field from it. Often you'll get an error because Revise.jl didn't recompile things. It was a sub-par experience and I was hoping to people would share their dev workflow in more detail
Recent versions of Revise let you redefine structs in the REPL.
You are not forced to use the REPL, ever. It’s a fantastic convenience, however.
My dev workflow is to write my code in Neovim, sometimes with a REPL attached to the editor to try out code snippets. I don’t need or use LSPs. I do enjoy the Aerial plugin, which pops up an outline of my code for easy navigation.
If you want a better Julia LSP, you might just be able to get Claude or Codex to build one for you. I've been impressed with the TLA+ bindings it generated.
I hope julia developper tools will one day match the best of what other programming languages have to offer.
Good LSPs do the autocompletion, sub par ones don't.
Is it really such a good idea to have every single automated aid turned on when picking up a new language?
How will you learn if you cannot get feedback on what you did wrong?
I mean, until you learn multiplication, maybe don't use the calculator.
Once you learn it then you get a small speed increase, but if you are new to something, LSP autocompletion is going to slow down your learning.
