Summary
In this chapter, we looked at three different ways that Julia can interact with other languages.
The first, simplest, and most effective is to refer to routines, residing in shared object libraries, usually created from C or Fortran compilers. We noted that this is also a convenient method to create some code and call it from Julia without any formal API being necessary.
Next, we considered some popular languages such as Python, R, and Java, and described how Julia packages exist to make the process simpler; also, we looked at how wrapper packages have been created to utilize existing ones, with a specific example of the SymPy Python package.
Finally, we discussed Julia’s ability to interface with the operating system in conjunction with pipelining and capturing the output and showed how by this mechanism it is possible to utilize other languages in a similar fashion to Unix utilities. The examples focused mainly on Perl but demonstrated briefly how languages...
