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by enriquto 1883 days ago
I like the idea of Pluto, because I cannot stand the non-deterministic cells of Jupyter notebooks anymore. Reading this page is like having sex with someone you love. Where has Pluto been all this time? I have finally found all what was missing for a complete life! There's even things that I didn't know I needed because I didn't even have the language to express them! This is my favorite page on the internet and Pluto is my favorite thing ever. I can see no downside to this, no defects, even with a conscious effort to do so.

Yet, trying Pluto, it seems to be outrageously slow and clunky. Is it expected? Sometimes it takes a few seconds to do something. I'm not talking about the initialization (which is still a shame, but that's a different issue). I'm talking about running individual cells with simple code. This is unusable as of today, at least on my 3-year old laptop.
2 comments
joppy 1883 days ago
Pluto is quite fast for me - could you perhaps be hitting the first-run JIT startup time in Julia? Do the cells re-evaluate quickly, after whatever code they depend on has been JITted?
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enriquto 1883 days ago
I'm talking about my second run of the notebook. On the first run it took one minute and a half just to open the notebook (it seemed it was downloading stuff, and then compiling).
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newswasboring 1883 days ago
hey, did you use Julia 1.5 or 1.6? There is a massive improvement in latency between those two versions.
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enriquto 1883 days ago
I'm using 1.5.3. Gonna update to 1.6 and see what happens.

EDIT: just running it on julia's "master" branch (v1.7.0-DEV), the initialization seems to be slower, but then the cells run maybe marginally faster. Looks good, but I could not push this to my students yet...

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newswasboring 1883 days ago
I wouldn't recommend master to anyone but the experts in julia. 1.6 is pretty stable though. Do remember that in Julia second execution of an instruction is much faster than the first. Thus, it may take some time to initialize, but after that it will run smoothly.

But yes, my tolerance towards this is higher as I am used to matlab.

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enriquto 1883 days ago
> my tolerance towards this is higher as I am used to matlab.

You may like octave for that (my daily runner, that I want to replace with julia in the future). It recognizes the same language as matlab; but it is free software and, crucially, the startup time is negligible. For example, you can run octave scripts inside a bash loop, as if it was a calculator.

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