In our Julia set up page on the QuantEcon lecture site we currently recommend installing Julia and then individual packages. Should we now be recommending JuliaPro instead? It looks pretty slick now. Is it typically up to date? What are people’s experiences like?
@Shunsuke-Hori @spencer.lyon @cc7768 @ChrisRackauckas and others, all thoughts appreciated.
JuliaPro has upgrading issues. I wouldn’t recommend it until those are worked out. Though it does do a pretty good job for what it is. Probably in a few months it’ll be the “goto newbie install”. But the real recommendation should be the generic binaries, Pkg.add, and add whatever IDE you want.
I agree with what @ChrisRackauckas said here.
I think that once JuliaPro is firmly on Julia version 0.6.0 we can consider recommending it.
Until then I’d stick with downloading a binary and adding desired packages.
I wouldn’t even say 0.6. Even early 1.0 might be too early. It dirties the git repos so Pkg.update() does work well for the built-in packages. While everything is in flux building toward 1.0 I think that’s not the best way to be working unless you absolutely need stability (instead of bugfixes!). After 1.0 and when the main packages “calm down” on their major features a bit (probably a month or so after 1.0), then it’ll be a really great product.
@azev77- We chose not to use it in the lecture series because it limits the packages we can use (and makes maintenance a pain… unfortunately for many packages, picking mutually compatible versions is still a bit of an art.)
For other use, my gut is to still avoid it… the “newbie” use case might be addressed by Jupyter hubs. But if using the General registry is smooth now, and you need stuff to be run locally without committing to a full Julia install… it might make sense.
But I would defer to @jlperla on any of this.
@azev77 alas, JuliaPro would make things much harder rather than easier (and I don’t see that changing in any way anytime soon). It is intended for corporate clients with a very tightly constrained set of packages (pinned far from the latest) and vetting of security.
That causes all sorts of grief because it means other packages can’t upgrade, etc. because they may require later versions of things JuliaPro pins. Given Julia’s package management system with Manifest and Project files, it means we would be in a constant state of being unable to support one package or another.
My guess is we should revisit in about 3 years. Luckily, julia and IJulia are pretty easy to install at the this point
The issues I’ve mentioned before have been fixed. For open source use, JuliaPro is now just a nice installation without requiring package versions. It comes with a decent set to start with, so it can be quite nice.
Does it still have its own registry or pinned packages?
No pinned packages and its registry just adds packages to what’s in General. So if you just do the standard stuff it should all work the same. This is JuliaPro v1.4.