On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 07:39:01AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote: > On 2017/11/20 09:43:44 -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 09:30:54AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote: > >> On 2017/11/19 4:19, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > >>> On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 12:43:19AM +0900, Akira Yokosawa wrote: > >>>> Hi Paul, > >>>> > >>>> Have you heard of "Julia" language? > >>>> > >>>> JFYI, > >>>> As can be seen in its official page at https://julialang.org/ and a Wikipedia > >>>> article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language), > >>>> it looks like one of promising answers to perfbook's Section 2.2 "Parallel > >>>> Programming Goals". > >>>> > >>>> As long as high-performance number crunching is concerned, it claims to have > >>>> comparable performance to C, with a programming productivity much better > >>>> than C + MPI. > >>>> > >>>> Note: I'm not a user of the language at the moment. I just heard of it at > >>>> a twitter hashtag #julialang. > >>>> > >>>> I'd like you to check it up and (hopefully) update the above mentioned > >>>> section in perfbook. > >>> > >>> I had heard of it, but I had not heard of it being seriously proposed > >>> as the answer to Section 2.2. I have added it to todo.txt with your > >>> Reported-by. > >>> > >>> Have you or has someone you know used this for a large parallel-programming > >>> project? (Just looking for some real-world confirmation.) > >> > >> So you want a secondary-source info on the real-world use? > >> > >> I learned of Julia from Gen Kuroki's twitter activity since this June. > >> He is a mathematician at Tohoku Univiersity, and experimenting/demonstrating > >> Monte Carlo analysis of several statistic problems using Julia (on a Windows PC!). > >> But what he is doing right now doesn't qualify as a _large_ parallel-programming > >> project. > >> > >> There is a case-studies page at https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/, > >> but this should be regarded as a primary source. > >> > >> One of the case study, "Deep Learning for Medical Diagnosis" at > >> https://juliacomputing.com/case-studies/ibm.html, looks like a collaboration > >> of IBM and Juliacomputing. > >> > >> Could this qualify as a real-world large parallel programming example? > > > > Maybe... Some evaluation and a proposal at the end... > > > > But please understand that 40+ years working in this field has made me > > deeply skeptical of sweeping claims for new languages. Now, don't get > > me wrong, Julia might well be great stuff that deserves mention in the > > book, but let's first take a quick look at history. > > > > Let's start with my employer, IBM. This URL is informative: > > > > http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/BackusEtAl-Preliminary%20Report-1954.pdf > > > > This is a 1954 report on the specifications for FORTRAN, reportedly > > co-authored by none other than John Backus. Please see page 3, first > > full paragraph: > > > > Since FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging, > > it should be possible to solve problems for less than half the > > cost that would be required without such a system. > > > > To be fair, they were comparing coding in FORTRAN to coding in IBM 704 > > assembly language, but still, my use of FORTRAN in the 1970s involved > > -significant- coding and debugging. ;-) > > I suppose it was the only language you could choose. > > > > > Julia's case-studies page is impressive, but at first glance it appears > > to mostly be centered on HPC, which leads me to question the "generality" > > part of the iron triangle of parallel programming. Gen Kuroki's use > > case seems to be in a similar area. > > As I said in the first mail in this thread: > > >>>> As long as high-performance number crunching is concerned, [...] > > I was not sure of "generality" either. > > > > > So what to do? > > > > For the upcoming release, nothing. After all, it is only a few days away. > > > > But perhaps later it might be good to expand Section 17.4 ("Functional > > Programming for Parallelism") to cover languages instead of just > > functional programming. Julia might fit in here, as might Rust (given > > the ownership aspects of its type system), Go (another popular parallel > > system), and maybe even Python (because everyone and their dog seems > > to use it). > > > > Does that seem reasonable? > > Sounds good! > > Julia seems the youngest one among them. > We can wait for (say) a few years to see where it goes, I suppose. And here is Eric Raymond's take on this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724 Thoughts? Thanx, Paul -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe perfbook" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
