Of Crows and Swans

In which I find a solution to run Julia code while rendering Quarto documents, not by some magical config-foo, but by switching from RStudio to VS Code.

Repeated attempts to follow the setup process for setting up the Julia engine and running / rendering Julia code blocks in Quarto failed.

NoteSCENE II. A street.

[...]
BENVOLIO
At this same ancient feast of Capulet's
Sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so lovest,
With all the admired beauties of Verona:
Go thither; and, with unattainted eye,
Compare her face with some that I shall show,
And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.

Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare¹

A final attempt – without any logical reasoning – was to use VS code instead of RStudio for rendering, which can work with quarto via the official Quarto extension. And behold:

begin
  a = 5
  b = 2
  c = a ^ b
  c
end

25

It just works, without any issue. Let’s check some more complex code and print some points!

# install the required package
begin
  import Pkg
  Pkg.add("CairoMakie")
end

begin
  using CairoMakie
  CairoMakie.activate!()
  fig = scatterlines(1:10, 1:10)
end

On the first render, it took quite some time to install and precompile the CairoMakie package, but after that the implementation is quite okay. I’m glad, this works now – this will make future posts much easier.

Footnotes

1. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, https://shakespeare.mit.edu