Limitations

Mismatch in valid set of identifiers

Not all valid Julia identifiers are valid Python identifiers. Unicode identifiers are invalid in Python 2.7 and so PyJulia cannot call or access Julia methods/variables with names that are not ASCII only. Although Python 3 allows Unicode identifiers, they are more aggressively normalized than Julia. For example, ϵ (GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL) and ε (GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON) are identical in Python 3 but different in Julia. Additionally, it is a common idiom in Julia to append a ! character to methods which mutate their arguments. These method names are invalid Python identifers. PyJulia renames these methods by subsituting ! with _b. For example, the Julia method sum! can be called in PyJulia using sum_b(...).

Pre-compilation mechanism in Julia 1.0

There was a major overhaul in the module loading system between Julia 0.6 and 1.0. As a result, the “hack” supporting the PyJulia to load PyCall stopped working. For the implementation detail of the hack, see: https://github.com/JuliaPy/pyjulia/tree/v0.3.0/src/julia/fake-julia

For the update on this problem, see: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/28518

Ctrl-C does not work / terminates the whole Python process

Currently, initializing PyJulia (e.g., by from julia import Main) disables KeyboardInterrupt handling in the Python process. If you are using normal python interpreter, it means that canceling the input by Ctrl-C does not work and repeatedly providing Ctrl-C terminates the whole Python process with the error message WARNING: Force throwing a SIGINT. Using IPython 7.0 or above is recommended to avoid such accidental shutdown.

It also means that there is no safe way to cancel long-running computations or I/O at the moment. Sending SIGINT with Ctrl-C will terminate the whole Python process.

For the update on this problem, see: https://github.com/JuliaPy/pyjulia/issues/211

No threading support

PyJulia cannot be used in different threads since libjulia is not thread safe. However, you can use multiple threads within Julia. For example, start IPython by JULIA_NUM_THREADS=4 ipython and then run:

In [1]: %load_ext julia.magic
Initializing Julia runtime. This may take some time...

In [2]: %%julia
   ...: a = zeros(10)
   ...: Threads.@threads for i = 1:10
   ...:     a[i] = Threads.threadid()
   ...: end
   ...: a
Out[3]: array([1., 1., 1., 2., 2., 2., 3., 3., 4., 4.])

PyJulia does not release GIL

PyJulia does not release the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) while calling Julia functions since PyCall expects the GIL to be acquired always. It means that Python code and Julia code cannot run in parallel.