homebrew-julia

A small tap for the Homebrew project to install Julia. After installing Homebrew, you must install a fortran compiler. After that, all other dependencies will automatically be downloaded and compiled followed by Julia herself:

$ brew update
$ brew install gfortran
$ brew tap homebrew/homebrew-versions
$ brew tap staticfloat/julia
$ brew install julia

If you want to use Gaston for plotting, install gnuplot with the optional wxmac included before trying to plot with Gaston:

$ brew install gnuplot --wx

Compiling 64-bit Julia

Julia and dependent libraries can be compiled in 64-bit mode, allowing for 64-bit array indexes, and therefore arrays larger than 2^32 elements along a single axis. To compile Julia in 64-bit mode, specify the --64bit option when installing:

$ brew install --64bit julia

This will compile all necessary dependencies as 64-bit as well, with a 64 suffix on the name to distinguish these dependencies from their 32-bit counterparts (e.g. openblas-julia has the 64-bit counterpart openblas-julia64). Note that it currently is not possible to install 32-bit and 64-bit julia side-by-side.

Compiling against Accelerate

Julia can use Apple's native BLAS libraries instead of OpenBLAS which may improve performance in some linear-algebra heavy tasks. To compile julia with this configuration, pass the --with-accelerate option to brew install. Note that the julia, arpack-julia and sauite-sparse-julia formula all take in this option, and when switching from an OpenBLAS-backed julia to an Accelerate-backed julia, you must remove and reinstall all dependencies:

$ brew rm julia arpack-julia suite-sparse-julia
$ brew install julia --with-accelerate

Also note that the --with-accelerate option and the --64bit options are mutually exclusive; Accelerate does not have a 64-bit interface.

Building a bleeding-edge version of Julia

If you wish to test the newest development version of Julia, you can build with the --HEAD option:

$ brew install --HEAD julia

Note that to run the test suite you must also pass the --HEAD option to brew:

$ brew test -v --HEAD julia

Using OpenBLAS HEAD

If you wish to test the newest development version of OpenBLAS with Julia, you can do so by manually unlinking OpenBLAS, and installing the HEAD version of the formula:

$ brew unlink openblas-julia
$ brew install openblas-julia --HEAD

This will install the latest develop branch of OpenBLAS. Julia will happily link against this new version, but unfortunately SuiteSparse will not, so we must recompile SuiteSparse and therefore Julia:

$ brew rm suite-sparse-julia julia
$ brew install julia

Upgrading Julia

To upgrade Julia, remove and recompile (Typically you will be doing this when living on the latest development version, so we have included all --HEAD commands here):

$ brew rm julia
$ brew install --HEAD julia

Run tests after upgrading to make sure everything is functioning as expected. Even when Julia is able to build, the tests might still fail due to dependencies.

$ brew test -v --HEAD julia

If your tests fail, possibly due to dependencies getting out of sync, remove the dependencies and recompile:

$ brew rm julia arpack-julia suite-sparse-julia
$ brew install --HEAD julia && brew test -v --HEAD julia

Note that this procedure is necessary after upgrading gfortran, as the location of the gfortran libraries changes. If you have an idea on how to avoid this problem, I'd love to hear about it.