My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0
Honest question, just how fast is Julia anyway? Because performance is typically the main reason anyone would want to use it over alternatives. A lot of people justify Julia because, as noted in other comments, it is both high-level yet claims to be nearly as fast as C:<p>&gt; &quot;Julia is the fastest modern open-source language for data science, machine learning and scientific computing...with the speed, capacity and performance of C, C++...&quot; [4]<p>That&#x27;s a bold claim! And there is much evidence to the contrary. I often find that the language falls into a similar trap of many other languages where the creators are evangelists not quite sharing the whole picture. Writing fast Julia code is not always a pleasant experience as you often need to fight the easier idioms. It is marketed as fast, but really, how fast is it?<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zverovich.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;giving-up-on-julia.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zverovich.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;13&#x2F;giving-up-on-julia.html</a><p>&quot;What’s disappointing is the striking difference between the claimed performance and the observed one. For example, a trivial hello world program in Julia runs ~27x slower than Python’s version and ~187x slower than the one in C.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;developerworks&#x2F;community&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;jfp&#x2F;entry&#x2F;A_Comparison_Of_C_Julia_Python_Numba_Cython_Scipy_and_BLAS_on_LU_Factorization?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibm.com&#x2F;developerworks&#x2F;community&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;jfp&#x2F;entry...</a><p>&quot;We can code in Julia in a way similar to Python&#x27;s code. However, that code is slower than it should.  One way to speed Julia is to take into account the Fortran ordering it uses by looping on j before looping on i in the second loop.  We also add decorators to speed up the code.&quot;<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codementor.io&#x2F;zhuojiadai&#x2F;julia-vs-r-vs-python-string-sort-performance-an-unfinished-journey-to-optimizing-julia-s-performance-f57tf9f8s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codementor.io&#x2F;zhuojiadai&#x2F;julia-vs-r-vs-python-st...</a><p>&quot;...comparing R&#x27;s sorting speeds to Julia&#x27;s is not the complete story, even though on the surface R appears faster, and from a users&#x27; perspective, (once the data is loaded) R is still the king of speed.&quot;<p>Stackoverflow has quite a few user posts [3] from folks trying to get their code to perform at the advertised speed vs popular alternative languages. It&#x27;s not so easy.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;20613817&#x2F;julia-julia-lang-performance-compared-to-fortran-and-python" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;20613817&#x2F;julia-julia-lan...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliacomputing.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;juliacomputing.com&#x2F;</a>