C for Scientists: The New Julia Language

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Paul Krill from InfoWorld writes that developers of Julia seek to provide one dynamic language for high productivity and performance. Designed for building technical computing applications, the Julia language is the brainchild of developer Stefan Karpinski, along with Jeff Bezanson and Viral Shah.

The idea is that it should be extremely high productivity, said Stefan Karpinski. “To that end, it’s a dynamic language, so it’s relatively easy to program, and it’s got a very simple programming model. But it has extremely high performance, which cuts out [the need for] a third language [C], which is often [used] to get performance in any of these other languages. I should also mention NumPy, which is a contender for these areas. For Matlab, R, and NumPy, for all of these options, you need to at some point drop down into C to get performance. One of our goals explicitly is to have sufficiently good performance in Julia that you’d never have to drop down into C.”

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