Manifest.toml vs Project.toml in Julia

An Beginner’s Exploration of Pkg

If you’re new to Julia, check out the Learn Julia crash course 🚀

Although you may not have heard of it, the Julia programming language has caused a stir in the development community. Born in 2012, the speedy and easy-to-use language has recently become a favorite among machine learning and AI researchers, some of which are wondering if this could be the underdog that soon usurps Python.

Regardless of Python’s fate, the fact remains that Julia’s popularity will continue to grow as AI continues to weave its way into every aspect of our lives. To that end, I wanted to write a few introductory articles on Julia to help newcomers get up to speed as fast as possible. In this article, I will be exploring the difference between two files that are integral to Julia’s package management system: Manifest.toml and Project.toml.

Intro to Pkg

Like many other popular development languages, Julia comes with its own built-in package manager, Pkg, which you can use to add, remove, and update packages used in your project. Unlike many other languages however, Julia’s Pkg was built with the concept of environments baked in. An environment is simply a set of packages that can be used by a project. You can read more about why this…