Sometimes people ask: why does Julia need to be a new language? What about Julia is truly different from tools like Cython and Numba? The purpose of this blog post is to describe how Julia's design gives a very different package development experience than something like Cython, and how that can lead to many more optimizations. What I really want to show is: Julia's compilation setup is built for specialization of labor which is required for scientific progress Composition of Julia codes can utilize the compilation process to build new programs which are greater than the sum of the parts I will also explain some of the engineering tradeoffs which were made to make this happen. There are many state-of-the-art scientific computing and data science packages in Julia and what I want to describe is how these are using the more "hardcore ... READ MORE

In this post I would like to explain some of the state of the art packages in Julia and how they are pushing forward their disciplines. I think the part I would really like to make clear is the ways which Julia gives these packages a competitive advantage and how these features are being utilized to reach their end goals. Maybe this will generate some more ideas! What are the advantages for Julia in terms of package development? Using Python/R to use other people's packages is perfectly fine since then your code will just be as fast as the package code if all your time is in package code calls (I purposely leave MATLAB off this list because its interoperability is much more difficult to use). There is one big exception where using an efficient package can still be slow even when ... READ MORE