Developer Notes

If you're new to the Julia language, my favorite tutorial is this Introduction to Julia for Quantitative Economics. Sections 1-13 are the most relevant if you are an astronomer, but some of later numerical techniques can also be useful. Computing clusters will often have a Julia module; make sure you load a Julia version 1.6 or later.

For your development computer, download the precompiled binaries and add the Julia executable to your $PATH. Do not use a package manager to install Julia. The Julia compiler has a heavily modified glibc, which many package managers misconfigure (such as the AUR). Rust also faces this problem.

Package development

To make changes to this package, start up the Julia interpeter and run

julia> ] dev git@github.com:simonsobs/Pixell.jl.git

By default, this will place a copy of this package's repository in your home directory, ~/.julia/dev/Pixell. Changes to the code in this folder will be reflected in your global environment.

It can be helpful to write documentation alongside a live preview. This is accomplished with the LiveServer package. If you have a standard Julia installlation, you can run from the command line,

cd $HOME/.julia/dev/Pixell
julia --project=. -e "using Pixell, LiveServer; servedocs()"

This will render HTML pages and provide an HTTP server for local previews. The documentation will automatically update when you make changes.