jtrakk / about

about JuliaOptics

Abandoned

This organization and its repositories have been abandoned. The About section below is left intact. The work was abandoned for the following reasons:

• Julia does not offer significant acceleration over the numpy code of prysm -- only about 20%
• writing performant julia is significantly more difficult than writing performant numpy. The base language emits unvectorized code which is slower than numpy, the @avx macro is unstable and often crashes the interpreter, the allocator is much slower than numpy or even matlab, and . and ! are quasi-white space symbols that are far too important to the performance of an algorithm. @. prefixes to a line are slower than hand placing the ., so that is not a solution
• the language itself, as well as its tooling, is too immature, with poor documentation and many bugs or sharp edges
• errors in Julia are severely cluttered by multiple line long type information which does not aid clarity

About

JuliaOptics is an organization to house a suite of libraries for physical optics in Julia. This suite has particular goals from the outset:

• To respect the prior art that exists in the enumerable physical optics codes written in matlab, python, and so on and learn from their API design.

• To provide a minimal API that is easy to learn with a reasonable balance between explicit and "fluent" design.

• To enable truly next generation computation in optics through automatic differentiation and other areas of significant development in Julia.

This provides a set of guiding performance marks:

• To be more than (5x required, 100x desired) faster than prysm, the fastest public physical optics code.

• To freely support computation on CPU or GPU

• To force as few allocations as possible, keeping GC time below 15% overall.

The goal at the outset is not to have all features, but to specialize in computational physical optics with emphasis on propagation from pupil to PSF or vice-versa, and between planes. A numerical model of propagation through a coronagraph (two plane to plane, then pupil => PSF => pupil => PSF) will demonstrate the performance efficacy (or lack thereof) of Julia for this domain.