Julia is a free and open-source general purpose programming language made specifically for scientific computing. It combines the ease of writing in high-level languages like Python and Ruby with the technical power of MATLAB and Mathematica and the speed of C. Julia is ideal for university-level scientific programming and it’s used in research.

Some time ago Viral Shah, one of the language’s co-creators, got in touch with us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation to say his team was working on a port of Julia to the ARM platform, specifically for the Raspberry Pi. Since then, they’ve done sterling work to add support for ARM. We’re happy to announce that we’ve now added Julia to the Raspbian repository, and that all Raspberry Pi models are supported!

Not only did the Julia team port the language itself to the Pi, but they also added support for GPIO, the Sense HAT and Minecraft. What I find really interesting is that when they came to visit and show us a demo, they took a completely different approach to the Sense HAT than I’d seen before: Simon, one of the Julia developers, started by loading the Julia logo into a matrix within the Jupyter notebook and then displayed it on the Sense HAT LED matrix. He then did some matrix transformations and the Sense HAT showed the effect of these manipulations.

Viral says:

The combination of Julia’s performance and Pi’s hardware unlocks new possibilities. Julia on the Pi will attract new communities and drive applications in universities, research labs and compute modules. Instead of shipping the data elsewhere for advanced analytics, it can simply be processed on the Pi itself in Julia.

Our port to ARM took a while, since we started at a time when LLVM on ARM was not fully mature. We had a bunch of people contributing to it – chipping away for a long time. Yichao did a bunch of the hard work, since he was using it for his experiments. The folks at the Berkeley Race car project also put Julia and JUMP on their self-driving cars, giving a pretty compelling application. We think we will see many more applications.

I organised an Intro to Julia session for the Cambridge Python user group earlier this week, and rather than everyone having to install Julia, Jupyter and all the additional modules on their own laptops, we just set up a room full of Raspberry Pis and prepared an SD card image. This was much easier and also meant we could use the Sense HAT to display output.

Simon kindly led the session, and before long we were using Julia to generate the Mandelbrot fractal and display it on the Sense HAT:

.@richwareham's Sense HAT Mandelbrot fractal with @JuliaLanguage at @campython pic.twitter.com/8FK7Vrpwwf

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) May 9, 2017

Naturally, one of the attendees, Rich Wareham, progressed to the Julia set – find his code here: gist.github.com/bennuttall/…

Last year at JuliaCon, there were two talks about Julia on the Pi. You can watch them on YouTube:

• Minecraft and LEDs: Julia on the Raspberry Pi – Avik Sengupta
• Autonomous Driving for RC Cars with ROS and Julia – Jon Gonzales

Install Julia on your Raspberry Pi with:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install julia

You can install the Jupyter notebook for Julia with:

sudo apt install julia libzmq3-dev python3-zmq
sudo pip3 install jupyter
julia -e 'Pkg.add("IJulia");'

And you can easily install extra packages from the Julia console:

Pkg.add("SenseHat")

The Julia team have also created a resources website for getting started with Julia on the Pi: juliaberry.github.io

There never was a story of more joy / Than this of Julia and her Raspberry Pi

Many thanks to Viral Shah, Yichao Yu, Tim Besard, Valentin Churavy, Jameson Nash, Tony Kelman, Avik Sengupta, Simon Byrne and Elliott Saba for their work on the port. We’re all really excited to see what people do with Julia on Raspberry Pi, and we look forward to welcoming Julia programmers to the Raspberry Pi community.