creating a sysimage

[schrimpf]

If you want faster Julia startup times, I recommend creating a sysimage with some common packages compiled. Here's how I did it. These steps require using VSCode.

0. Clone the quantecon notebooks repository. The following directions assume you have them in ~/lecture-julia.notebooks

1. Open Julia with the quantecon environment activated. Update the packages by executing either

use Pkg
Pkg.activate("~/lecture.julia.notebooks")
Pkg.update()

or press ] and then enter activate ~/lecture.julia.notebooks and then update. This will take some time.

2. Create the folder ~/lecture.julia-notebooks/.vscode , and put the following in a file named ~/lecture-julia.notebooks/.vscode/JuliaSysimage.toml

[sysimage]
exclude=["Arpack", "BlackBoxOptim", "DataInterpolations",
"DataFramesMeta", "FixedEffectModels", "Ipopt", "IterativeSolvers",
"JuMP", "LeastSquaresOptim", "NLopt", "NLsolve",
"Optim", "QuantEcon", "RDatasets","OrdinaryDiffEq",
"DiffEqOperators","StochasticDiffEq", "Preconditioners",
"Graphs", "RegressionTables", "IncompleteLU", 
"CategoricalArrays", "Expectations", "VegaLite",
"FastGaussQuadrature", "KernelDensity", "ApproxFun",
"ProgressMeter", "Test", "BandedMatrices", "QuadGK", 
 "Parameters", "GLM", "LinearMaps", "Roots", "SparseArrays", 
 "Interpolations", "DataFrames"]
execution_files=["./.vscode/precompile_exe.jl"]

You could modify the exclude list. I'm not sure what packages must be excluded.

Put the following in a file named ~/lecture-julia.notebooks/.vscode/precompile_exe.jl

using Plots
n = 100
p = plot(rand(2,2))
scatter!(rand(n),rand(n))
display(p)

You can add additional commands if there are other things you want to ensure get compiled.

3. Go to Terminal -> Run Task -> julia -> Julia: Build custom sysimage for the current environment. This will take some time.

4. To use the sysimage, just open the ~/lecture-julia.notebooks folder in VSCode. To use the sysimage outside of VSCode, start julia with julia -J ~/lecture-julia.notebooks/JuliaSysimage.o --project=~/lecture-julia.notebooks