Concurrency in Julia

Threads in Julia indeed was a part that confused me a lot when getting started. Wow I couldn’t find a primitive to start a new OS thread? Either I can use the auto-parallelize tools feeling very similar to OpenMP, or I can go with M:N user threads.

Now I think I have a better grasp of the whole picture and no longer worry about that. I used to think of Julia as “a high-performance general-purpose langauge with sugar for numeric computation”, but that view doesn’t fit well. Perhaps it is better viewed as “a high-performance numeric computing DSL with abilities to do some general-purpose programming”. The community measures and improves performance of Julia based on FLOPS numbers, instead of e.g. packets/s or 99.9% response time; this is not the tool for me if I wrap up a flat-combining data structure every other day, but it’s an excellent choice for crunching terabytes of tabular data, millions-by-millions sparse matrices, etc. Its bias towards OLAP made it a great tool, but also made some scenarios harder. The term “high performance” need some qualifications, but well, OLTP and OLAP community never agreed with each other on this topic…