Julia and Microsoft Visual Studio

[Pileas]

I am experimenting a bit with different text editors and IDEs.

So far I have been quite happy with Atom editor, but there you need to always use the command line to execute the code (I have installed a `terminal` package that calls the bash quite quickly in Atom).

I was wondering if there is a package or something for Julia that we can install so that Visual Studio recognizes the language, like the one that exists for Python.

I believe that this may help a lot in the debigging as well, since it will be easier to see and will save some time.

[Tony Kelman]

No, this doesn't exist yet as far as I know. I have no idea how plugins / syntax extensions to Visual Studio work. I'm pretty sure the Python Tools for Visual Studio plugin is developed by Microsoft, Julia has nowhere near that level of official involvement from Microsoft that I know of.

The recent announcement of Visual Studio Community Edition being freely available for open-source work means this might be worth pursuing if you're really interested in using Visual Studio as an IDE for Julia. Express never supported plugins, but the community edition does.

Tying into Visual Studio's debugger would probably be very hard. Maybe it would work okay if your Julia executable is compiled with MSVC, but that only barely functions right now - a few key LLVM intrinsics-related pieces are broken. Should improve with future versions of LLVM.

[Daniel Høegh]

I think Julia would benefit from having a MIT licensed scientific IDE written in Julia similar to the Spyder project in python. But in short term we maybe could leverage the Spyder project, I have hacked a crude implementation of a Julia terminal into the Spyder enviroment using the existing Ipython terminal see: https://bitbucket.org/spyder-ide/spyderlib/pull-request/71/julia-console-for-spyder/diff. If anyone would like to continue the work it would be awesome, for the time being I don't have time.

[Mauro]

Lighttable is now also MIT

[Daniel Carrera]

Interesting idea. I don't know Spyder, but Wikipedia says that it "integrates NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib and IPython". What does it mean by that? I would love to see a package that included both Julia and the Python scientific libraries. I don't particularly like Python, but I like the scientific libraries that it brings. I currently use Matplotlib with Julia via PyPlot.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[Daniel Høegh]

Spyder is a Matlab like IDE with variableexplore, syntax checker, linter, debugger and profiler. It's ships with many Python distribution that focus on scientific use including WinPython PythonXY and Anaconda. I miss many of the features/helpful tools in an IDE. I am sure they will come to Julia with time.

[Uwe Fechner]

There is a pull request for supporting Julia within Spyder:
https://bitbucket.org/spyder-ide/spyderlib/pull-request/71/julia-console-for-spyder/diff

Es far as I understand the Spyder developers are waiting for IPython 3.0 before they integrate IJulia.

You can also vote for the following issue:
https://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/issues/detail?id=1976

[Daniel Høegh]

Hi Uwe
It's my pull-request but I have not worked on it for a while.

[Pileas]

Then I think I will stick with Atom editor. After all it is very decent!.

Like the programmers of the old days, I have to get used to the terminal. But it is fine, since I also use Linux I am familiar with it.

P.S. I saw that Forio has made an effort with Julia Studio for people that want an IDE.

[Airhead Bit]

Atmel (Arduino CPU) has a product, Atmel Studio 6.2, that uses Visual Studio. You can install it and try it, if you have the time, it takes forever to start and their attempt at a 'Wizard' is only a sales tool to market eval. boards. They were using Eclipse and out of the blue came up with with this product. I can only guess that they figured to create something really simple like the Arduino IDE for writing assembly code.

I have been using Eclipse for embedded processors but before that it was Ultra Studio, before that it was Brief, none of those will work with Julia.

I tried Julia Studio and like it, the packages are on the left, the output console has a clear button and the editor works for me using AsuType for keystroke processing. When they have compiler support I'll look at using Ultra Studio or Eclipse but until then this works.

[David Anthoff]

The Python Tools for Visual Studio are developed by MS, but are completely open source, so I guess one might be able to get all the info on how to develop a new language plugin for VS from that code.

[Páll Haraldsson]

On Monday, December 1, 2014 at 7:39:20 PM UTC, David Anthoff wrote:

The Python Tools for Visual Studio are developed by MS, but are completely open source, so I guess one might be able to get all the info on how to develop a new language plugin for VS from that code.

I'm NOT saying we should be making Julia work well with Visual Studio.

For those who might want it I noticed Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux. [Native Linux binaries, you do not need Wine.]

[This was quite a surprise (or would have been some years ago). This probably is their first (non-trivial at least) Linux application. Excluding for Android, such as Office. And their Linux kernel contributions are not an app, as in the kernel (and only for HyperV).]

-- 

Palli.

[Uwe Fechner]

Well, only "Visual Studio Code" is available for Linux (and Mac).
https://code.visualstudio.com/

This is quite different from "Visual Studio" and has a lot less features.

Uwe