The current state of Julia software libraries for astronomy
11-06, 08:30– (US/Arizona), Posters

Julia is a programming language designed for high performance scientific computing. This poster presents the current state of Julia software libraries for astronomy, i.e., AstroJulia libraries. It lists those basic functional libraries that are available today and those that are expected soon, and compares and contrasts those libraries with similar AstroPy libraries. It shows that AstroJulia functionality is nearly on par with that of AstroPy, while providing much higher performance.

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I am a research professor at The George Washington University. My research area is multi-wavelength observations of magnetic cataclysmic variables with a current focus on radio observations. I have been developing scientific software for over 40 years. My first project was developing a data acquisition program for an optical polarimeter at the South African Astronomical Observatory. The program was written in the C programming language for an IBM AT personal computer. In the mid-90s, a colleague and I advocated for Python to be the primary data analysis language for astronomy. As a result, I spent a number of years at the Space Telescope Science Institute developing core Python packages for scientific computing and astronomy, e.g., numerical python/numpy, PyFITS, and matplotlib. In the last five years, I have migrated from Python to the Julia programming language, because I believe it is the future of scientific programming. I am currently developing various core Julia modules and applications for astronomy. Two such modules are the Astrometry module for precise time and position calculations, and Visfit for analyzing radio interferometric data.