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 staticfloat/julia
$ brew install --HEAD 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 --HEAD --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.

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 --HEAD julia

Known Issues

• The --with-accelerate option does not work due the newer BLAS functions available in OpenBLAS, relied upon by Julia. This is not being actively investigated, as usage of Accelerate is not a high priority.