Transpiling Python to Julia using PyJL
Marcelino, Miguel, António Leitão · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022
Transpilers convert source code between programming languages. With the rise of new high-level programming languages, transpilers are ideal tools to speedup the conversion of libraries written in more established languages to newer and/or less popular ones, fostering their adoption. Julia is a recently introduced programming language that targets various application areas of the widely popular Python language. Unfortunately, it still lacks many of the high-quality libraries found in Python. To speedup the development of libraries, we propose extending the PyJL transpiler to translate Python source code into human-readable, maintainable, and high-performance Julia source code. Despite being at an early development stage, our preliminary results show that PyJL generates human-readable code that can achieve good performance with minor changes.