[LLVMdev] Introducing julia, and gauging interest in a julia BOF session at the upcoming LLVM conference in London

[Viral Shah]

Folks,

We are contemplating holding a Birds of a Feather session titled "Julia and LLVM: Implementing a fast dynamic language for technical computing" at the LLVM 2012 European Conference on April 12-13 in London.

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-04-12/

Would this be of interest to the LLVM developer and user community? It would be great if you could drop me a line.  It will help us gauge the interest and decide if we should hold the session or not.

A little bit about julia:

Julia is an open source language for technical computing that strives to be in the same class of productivity as Matlab, R, python+numpy, etc., but targets the performance of C and Fortran. It is due to LLVM that julia has been able to achieve such good performance (in my opinion), with relatively little effort in a short amount of time. While we have not been active on the LLVM mailing list, we look forward to every new release, and the goodies it brings. We are really looking forward to integrating polly, GPU, autovectorization capabilities, etc. Julia has been in development by a core group consisting of our compiler writer Jeff Bezanson, with Stefan Karpinski and myself contributing the runtime and libraries, and Prof. Alan Edelman focussing on numerical accuracy. We do look forward to meeting with all the folks behind LLVM and the community at large.

Julia was quietly announced in the release notes of LLVM 3.0. It was officially announced only recently in a blog post on Feb 14, 2012. Our "Why Julia" blog post links to various blogs and discussion forums:
http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/

The github site for julia development has also attracted a number of developers and we are hoping that this is the start of a great community:
https://github.com/juliaLang/julia/

Do hop on to our website, where we show some simple micro-benchmarks comparing julia to other languages:
http://www.julialang.org/


Thanks,

-viral