Introduction to Julia – Part I

Articles From: QuantInsti
Website: QuantInsti

This article introduces the Julia programming language, which is specifically designed for scientific computing, that solves the “two-language problem”, i.e. it provides the performance at par with C and the dynamic nature of Python and R.

This series of articles will take you through the journey of getting started with Julia programming to backtesting and implementing live trading strategies in it.

This is the first article in the series and has the following sections –

  • What is Julia?
  • Why do we need another programming language?
  • Is Julia faster than Python or R?
  • How to install Julia?
  • How to run Julia in a Jupyter notebook?
  • How to install packages in Julia?
  • Basic packages in Julia
  • Julia packages for Algorithmic Trading

What is Julia?

Julia is a high-performance programming language specifically designed for efficient numerical computing. It aims to provide high computational speed combined with an easy-to-write programming language.

Julia project was started in 2009 and was released as an open-source language (under MIT license) through a blog post in 2012. Julia 1.0 was released in 2018. The Julia user base has grown widely as the scientific community realised its potential. As of July 2021, Julia has 203,400+ GitHub stars, provides 6000+ registered packages and has over 29 million downloads.


Why do we need another programming language?

The scientific community has always faced a trade-off between the high-performance vs dynamic nature of programming. Programming languages like Matlab, R or Python are widely used in the scientific community.

However, when it comes to solving challenges that require enormously high computation power, the code has to be re-written in languages like C or Fortran to achieve this goal. This is called the “two-language problem”.

Julia claims to solve this challenge by combining the best of both worlds, i.e., speed and easy-to-write language.


Is Julia faster than Python or R?

Let’s look at some benchmarks.

Computation times

The following figure shows the computation time for various languages on different operations (mentioned in the legend). The vertical axis shows each benchmark time normalised against the C implementation.

As we can see, Julia is closest to C for most of the operations, lagging behind LuaJIT and Rust in some cases. It’s much faster than Python or R. More details on this benchmark test can be found here.

Source: https://julialang.org/benchmarks/

Multiple operations on large datasets

The below chart compares the task of the groupby function across various packages. “Query 1” in the figure below is one of the tests performed, and DF.jl (a Julia package) turned out to be the fastest. There are many other queries performed here.

Source: https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

For query 1: “sum v1 by Id1”: 100 groups of ~10,000,000 rows, Python (pandas package) and R (dplyr package) resulted in an internal error and out of memory error, respectively while Julia took 2.4 seconds the first time and 1.8 seconds the second time.

Stay tuned for the next installment in which Anshul Tayal will demonstrate how to install Julia.

Visit QuantInsti for additional insight on this topic: https://blog.quantinsti.com/julia-programming/.

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