Compiling Julia on the Raspberry Pi is quite the journey.
Prerequisites
Packages
There a few packages that you must install prior to starting the compile.
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libatomic1 python gfortran perl wget m4 cmake pkg-config libopenblas-dev git ccache
Swap File
The standard, out of the box swap file configuration is not sufficient. The swap file is configured for only 100MB, which the compiler will go through very fast.
You can increase the size of the swap file by editing /etc/dphys-swapfile as sudo/root. Below are the recommended values:
CONF_SWAPSIZE=8192
CONF_MAXSWAP=8192
After editing the /etc/dphys-swapfile, you can either reboot or execute the following:
sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop && sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start
Use the Source!
Change into the directory that you would like to keep your projects. Execute:
git clone https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia.git
You can change into the julia directory and either work from master or checkout one of the existing releases/tags ( i.e. v1.0.2).
If you are going to keep up to date with master, or compile on a more frequest basis, then creating a Make.user file will save you some pain with the extended compile times that Julia will have on the Raspberry Pi.
echo "USECCACHE=1" > Make.user
Compiling
Executing Make
This is perhaps the easiest step. You will just need to execute make from the directory you checked out your code as follows:
make
Due to the memory limits, running multiple jobs (i.e. make -j...) is not recommended.
The hard part
The hardest part is waiting. On a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the initial build takes 12+ hours. Subsequent builds after creating the Make.user file as described above should only take around two hours.
Distributing
Binary Distributions
Additional details can be found here.
make binary-dist