"Julia program to a standalone executable"

[dmm]

Last spring I could not figure out how to make a standalone executable in Julia. Which was not good (this prevented me from submitting an entry to a demo party).

Finally, someone has posted detailed instructions for Windows (likely to work on other platforms, but not tested), and they contain steps that I had no idea about:

www.linkedin.com/pulse/julia-program-standalone-executable-anders-persson/

Comments

[dmm]

Let's copy the important parts from that post. I'll need to verify that this work (and check whether all these steps are needed).

After the obvious (have Julia and PackageCompiler.jl installed), non-obvious parts start:

1) From the package manager prompt (what you get after typing ])

generate HelloWorld

2) Edit the source file e.g.

“D:\julisrc\helloworld\src\helloworld.jl”

to have the julia_main function, You need to have the entry point with a name

julia_main

, or otherwise the standalone program will not work. The function also need a return 0 last, otherwise the standalone program will print an error after running, which doesn’t look good 😁

function julia_main()
  println("Hello World!")
  return 0
end

to be continued

[dmm]

3) In Julia:

using PackageCompiler

create_app("helloWorld", "standalone", force=true)

4) Invoke Julia like this

julia -q --project makeHelloWorld.jl

You will get a warning about a manifest-file that will be created, but it does not affect the standalone program in any way.

5) Now You can find

“helloWorld.exe”

in the folder

“standalone/bin”

All the files in

“standalone/bin”

are required for the prototype to run, so to give away Your program simply Zip the

“bin”

folder and You are done.

Overall, pretty annoying actually. That's not the normally smooth experience I am used to in my Julia workflows.

But at least it's doable (yes, this does seem to be a case of missing documentation, at least as of Spring 2020; I should see if I can/should contribute to fixing this).

[dmm]

-q, --quiet	Quiet startup: no banner, suppress REPL warnings

So it's enough to just

julia --project makeHelloWorld.jl

The

-q

just prevents you from seeing complaints.

--project[={|@.}]	Set  as the home project/environment. The default @. option will search through parent directories until a Project.toml or JuliaProject.toml file is found.

(From https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/command-line-options/)

[dmm]

Let's repurpose this post for other Julia-related notes too (I seem to be starting a new cycle where I would need a larger set of Julia tools).

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/distributed-computing/

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/Distributed/

*****

( https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/serialization-in-julia/ )

Standard serialization works, at least for nested dictionaries.

[dmm]

Today people presented Dagger.jl:

https://www.meetup.com/Julia-User-Group-Munich/events/281693605/

https://github.com/jpsamaroo/DaggerMeetup

https://github.com/JuliaParallel/Dagger.jl

https://github.com/DhairyaLGandhi/DaggerFlux.jl

[dmm]

(Started https://github.com/anhinga/late-2021-julia-drafts for the new series of experiments.

Reached "559 contributions in the last year" on github (and 200 followers on twitter; 1158 tweets).)

[dmm]

"568 contributions in the last year" (but over 250 of them are to private repositories), 259 followers on twitter, 1225 tweets)