Julia's place among the other programming languages

Julia reconciles and brings together the technologies that before were considered separate, namely:

  • The dynamic, untyped, and interpreted languages on the one hand (Python, Ruby, Perl, MATLAB/Octave, R, and so on)
  • The statically typed and compiled languages on the other (C, C++, Fortran, and Fortress)

How can Julia have the flexibility of the first and the speed of the second category?

Julia has no static compilation step. The machine code is generated just-in-time by an LLVM-based JIT compiler. This compiler, together with the design of the language, helps Julia to achieve maximal performance for numerical, technical, and scientific computing. The key for the performance is the type information ...

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