Introduction

“Julia is a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language. While it is a general purpose language and can be used to write any application, many of its features are well-suited for high-performance numerical analysis and computational science.” — from Wikipedia: Julia (programming language).

In this guide, I’ll show you how to get started with Julia on Ubuntu 16.04 (or above).

Installation

Open a new terminal and go to your Downloads folder:

cd ~/Downloads

Use wget to retrieve the latest compressed Julia Linux Binaries:

wget https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/linux/x64/1.8/julia-1.8.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Extract the .tar.gz:

tar -xvzf julia-1.8.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Copy the extracted folder to /opt:

sudo cp -r julia-1.8.3 /opt/

Finally, create a symbolic link to julia inside the /usr/local/bin folder:

sudo ln -s /opt/julia-1.8.3/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

Conclusion

Finally, you can test your installation by re-opening a terminal and typing:

julia

What’s next?

If you are here, chances are that you are just starting to learn Julia. I hope you enjoy the programming language as much as I have enjoyed it in the last couple of months.

If you are going to be using Julia in the context of optimization, check out this simple example: Solving a Geometry Quiz with JuMP. As a more complex example, you can use Julia to optimize the Space Shuttle Reentry Trajectory. Finally, for a real-world application of Julia, check out my research in robotics.