18

It appears that brew does not have a Julia formula. This is quite surprising to me, am I missing something?

Apparently there's a brew tap that can be used instead (staticfloat/julia). Before going for that solution I wanted to know if that's supposed to be the most straightforward way to do so.

Improve this question
1
  • 1
    The reason the only julia formula you will find is in a tap right now is because Julia has, historically, had pretty strict version requirements on dependencies such as LLVM. Homebrew likes to provide only the most recent version of formulae, and as Julia 0.4 still uses LLVM 3.3, this poses a problem for a mainline Homebrew Julia formula. There is the Homebrew/versions tap that has older versions of LLVM available, but by that time, you are no better off than just having a tap dedicated to Julia. The cask approach also works, as long as you don't need to custom compile anything.
    – staticfloat
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 20:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
27

You can install Julia using cask:

$ brew cask install julia

$ brew cask info julia
julia: 0.4.2
Julia
http://julialang.org/
Not installed
https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/julia.rb
==> Contents
  Julia-0.4.2.app (app)
  Julia-0.4.2.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia (binary)
Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Just out of curiosity, why is it a cask and not a formula?
    – P Varga
    Commented Jun 25, 2020 at 0:29
2

To clarify, The Julia installation that you get if you go to https://julialang.org/downloads/ and download Julia 1.6.3 dmg for Mac is exactly the same as the installation that Homebrew's Cask currently gets, which is evidenced here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/master/Casks/julia.rb

However, Julia behaves differently once you've actually installed the Homebrew Julia 1.6.3 Cask versus the Julia 1.6.3 from https://julialang.org/downloads/. I first experienced this when trying to use PackageCompiler.jl to make a shippable application using Homebrew's Julia 1.6.3 Cask install. With this install, the app continued to fail despite all my efforts. When I switched to the Julia 1.6.3 dmg install from https://julialang.org/downloads/, the PackageCompiler app worked and was relocatable.

So just a heads up, these two methods install Julia differently on the system, resulting in Julia behaving differently in some cases.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .