Torch.jl VS astropy

For frontends Python has quite some head-start. In principle it would be possible to write Julia frond-ends to existing ML libraries (written e.g. in C), for example https://github.com/FluxML/Torch.jl , but the advantages over Python frontends would be very limited. Only a front-to-back Julia implementation leverages most of the language advantages like composibility and flexibility.

PyTorch for example is a C++ library with a Python user interface, see e.g. the language shares in GitHub (https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch ). There is also a Julia binding for Torch (https://github.com/FluxML/Torch.jl), but I do not know how up-to-date it is.

Astropy [0] lives at the heart of most work. It has a Python interface, often backed by Fortran and C++ extension modules. If you use Astropy, you're indirectly using libraries like ERFA [6] and cfitsio [7] which are in C/Fortran.

I personally end up doing a lot of work that uses the HEALPix sky tesselation, so I use healpy [2] as well.

Openorb is perhaps a good example of a pure-Fortran package that I use quite. frequently for orbit propagation [3].

In C, there's Rebound [4] (for N-body simulations) and ASSIST [5] (which extends Rebound to use JPL's pre-calculated positions of major perturbers, and expands the force model to account for general relativity).

There are many more, these are just ones that come to mind from frequent usage in the last few months.

[0] https://www.astropy.org/

Users interested in a broader range of astronomical tools beyond coordinate transformations may be interested in https://www.astropy.org/ and its affiliated packages.

I'm working on a pure Rust approximation of astropy. Up til now, I was able to recreate the intent by looking at an external API, but I'm moving on to functionality that I don't understand enough to implement without basically copying the code. Astropy uses the BSD-3 license, and it wraps the ERFA library which uses a custom license. My project currently uses the MIT license. My PR is here - my question is have I attributed everything correctly, or is there anything I need to change for everything to be above-board?

For folks who might be interested in astronomical calculations but who don't want to roll their own library, astropy (https://www.astropy.org/) is widely used by professional astronomers.

I agree with the other commenter. Check out their github. If you’re looking to build your skills long term (and have some experience with python) it’s worth checking out astropy and their fits file handling routines.