Julia Client Binary in Nim

Julia is a great language, however is not easy to use it for scripts because due to its JIT compiler it takes time to run it. The main percentage of that time is invested to the fact that any used package is compiled every time it is run, this is called the time-to-first-plot, making in practice scripts in Julia slower than in other language like Python.

This problem is solved with my DaemonMode.jl package, inspired in the daemon mode of other software, like Emacs. Using this package you can run a process running in Julia, juliaserver:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
julia -e 'using DaemonMode; serve()' &

and another one jclient_client that send the filename to be run to the previous file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
julia -e 'using DaemonMode; runargs()' $*

Compile and install the program

1. Download nim from https://nim-lang.org/, and
2. git clone https://github.com/dmolina/juliaclient_nim.git
3. cd juliaclient_nim
4. nimble install
5. copy jclient OUTPUT (where OUTPUT is a directory in your PATH).

Benchmark

For instance, with a script that load packages CSV and DataFrame:

$ time jclient_julia test.jl 7days.csv 
...

real	0m1.389s
user	0m0.489s
sys   0m0.333s

While using jclient_julia it takes only (with juliaserver loaded):

$ time jclient_julia test.jl 7days.csv 
...
real	0m0.443s
user	0m0.511s
sys   0m0.292s

The half of second is due to running the julia interpreter.

This software compile to a binary-version of julia client, using Nim language. In that way, the time is greatly reduced:

$ time jclient test.jl 7days.csv
...
real	0m0.019s
user	0m0.004s
sys   0m0.007s