Interoperability

In this chapter, I will discuss cooperation between Julia and other languages with the underlying operating system, and how Julia naturally encourages the use of parallel processing without the need for frameworks such as Hadoop or Spark.

The developers of Julia naturally focused on calling from Julia, and most of the discussions will be concerned with that; however, handles were provided to go the other way and call Julia from C and hence incorporate it into foreign code. A brief overview of this is given later.

Julia has a rich and varied syntax, but a vast wealth of code has always existed in object libraries covering a wide range of specialties. So, it was considered that a simple mechanism to call functions from these libraries would prove to be useful, and a one-line native ccall() instruction call was added. This became a cornerstone of the way Julia operates, as we will see later.

C-style connectivity led to the development of packages that effectively...