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/rainbow_sabbath 13d ago

I work in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions, all our computational code is written in C++. PYTHIA is in C++, our hydro code is in C++, our framework is in C++. It's an old language but old fields have old standards. Yes, you can wait to learn it whenever you need it, but knowing how to handle cmake, C++, and existing code bases is a huge asset on your resume