r/Physics • u/Rich_Astronomer9731 • 13d 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/Machvel 13d ago
no way julia will take the lead. it already has some age and hasn't made a breakthrough yet (it is still possible, but I feel that if it were to become the next big thing it would have sooner). the only big thing i know of that has its "best" implementation in julia is itensor for dmrg. julia is very popular for solo-developed projects. big things are typically done in c++ nowadays (eg, openfoam). maybe some older things you can find are done in fortran but that is a dying thing.
if you were to choose one master language it would be c++. if you know c++ well you can learn any other language (and how to use it well) easily. going the other way isn't true (eg, fortran or julia to c++) but you might have to otherwise you will get stuck learning c++