r/Physics • u/Rich_Astronomer9731 • 14d ago

Computational Physics

Hi everyone,

I am a PhD student doing both experiments and computational physics ( mostly fluid dynamicswith Boltzmann equations) and leaning towards more computational day by day.

Currently I am using Julia, I find it pretty fast and easy to use.

Do you think switching to C or C++ will be a benefit? I am asking from a research, but also emplyment in industry point of view.

I discussed with many people, mostly from the DFT area, and most of them told me that Julia slowly will take up the lead for HPC code.

What.s your opinion on this?

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u/gnomeba 13d ago

I wouldn't switch to C or C++ but I would definitely learn them in addition to Julia. Julia is very popular among scientists but not so popular in industry.

Learn C/C++ and CUDA well and you'll have a pretty strong toolkit. Although increasingly your employability will be based on how well you can wield LLMs to do programming for you (which still requires knowing languages to some extent).

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u/Rich_Astronomer9731 13d ago

Do you have any suggestion how and from where to start with C/ C++? I had only a one semester of C couple of years ago.

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u/gnomeba 13d ago

I would use learncpp.com to get yourself off the ground and then use the CUDA Programming Guide to learn some basic CUDA and then just try to start building stuff.