Making a Julia Binary

Compile your Julia project with PackageCompiler for portability

Julia is a JIT language; however, sometimes it might be nice to have an executable. There are two ways to interact with PackageCompiler: Using the CLI using juliac and by adding PackageCompiler as part of your script. This article will go over both.

Table of contents

Initial Setup

1. Install Julia 1.1.0 if absent
2. Install PackageCompiler and Deps

julia -e 'using Pkg;
      Pkg.add("ArgParse");
      Pkg.add("PackageCompiler")'

Alias PackageCompiler to juliac

The full command to compile is julia /variable/path/to/juliac.jl. The path to this file is dependent on where PackageCompiler is stored and different on every system. We are going to save time by using an alias.

bash

$ juliac_path='julia -e println(normpath(Base.find_package(\
  "PackageCompiler"),"..", "..")'
$ echo "juliac ${juliac_path}juliac.jl" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

powershell

PS> $juliac_dir = julia -e 'println(normpath(Base.find_package(`
    \"PackageCompiler\"),\"..\",\"..\"))'
PS> Add-Content -Path $profile -Value "function juliac { julia `"${juliac_dir`" }"

Hello World!

# hello_world.jl
function AwesomeFunction()
  println("Hello World!")
end

Base.@ccallable function julia_main(ARGS::Vector{String})::Cint
    AwesomeFunction()
    return 0
end

Compiling

Use juliac hello_world.jl -tavern hello_world to generate the executable:

• -t Remove temp build files
• -a Automatically build required dependencies
• -v Verbose
• -e Make executable
• -r Implies -O3 -g0
• -n Output file name

$ cd builddir
$ ./hello_world
Hello World!

Packaging

tar -cvzf hello_world.tar.gz builddir/*

The result should be approximately 26MB, regardless of system.

See Also

• PackageCompiler