On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 10:34:40 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On 12/12/13 01:56, bearophile wrote:
Look better, Julia aims also at partially replacing Python as
golden glue in
scientific computing, and it seems to have some of the numbers
for it. It's
statically typed, it has type inferencing, a refined type
system with
multi-methods and more, and a good LLVM-based JIT (that's in
my benchmarks
produces a performance no more than 2-4 times slower than D
compiled with ldc2.
If you compile D with dmd Julia is often faster for FP-heavy
code. This means
it's much faster than any Python code).
Is that taking into account stuff like NumPy/SciPy which is C
underneath and (according to colleagues who use it; I don't)
super-fast?
It's better than Matlab about as much as D is better than C,
and it's already
better than Python for some things :-) And Julia is currently
much more
flexible than D (there's a REPL, lot of scientific routines in
the std lib, and
the JIT). In two years its easy to write code has allowed lot
of people to
write more standard library than D community has done in 7
years.
Interesting. I did take a look at Julia after discovering that
a colleague used it; it certainly has many friendly features,
but I found myself worrying that some of the "easy"
mathematical notation might very readily lend itself to
unfortunate typos that in turn would generate bugs and wrong
results.
That said, when it comes to stuff like MATLAB/Octave you are
often not writing extended code bases but short and easy stuff
for data analysis, so there is much less need for concern over
this kind of thing. I imagine the same might apply to Julia,
which at the same time looks like it should make it easier to
develop larger-scale stuff if it's wanted, despite the things
I'm worried about.
My colleagues use Matlab for prototyping, but you cannot use it
for serious programs. The thing is that all languages like
R/Matlab/Python etc. are good for testing scientific algorithms,
but if you want to use them in real world programs (say speech
recognition), you'll have to re-write it in a language like
D/C/C++.
