Julia Platform
CategoryProgramming Language
Julia is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language and a platform designed for high-performance numerical analysis and computational science. It uses math-friendly syntax, maintains type stability and operates at speeds suitable for Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Computing.
Data Science Environment
Type Stability and Multiple Dispatch
Julia is a young language where most of the key developments come from the MIT Julia Lab. Julia platform provides a single environment for scientific and numerical computing: productive enough for prototyping and efficient enough for deploying performance-intensive applications, with speeds comparable to statically-typed languages.
Historically, Data Scientists would first use Python or R to develop an algorithm, and once happy with the results, they would rewrite the program in Java or C/C++ to get the required computer processing performance. Now it can be achieved with one language: Julia is fast because it is specifically designed to quickly implement the basic mathematics that underlies most Data Science, such as matrix expressions and linear algebra.
Julia features optional typing — with types being runtime objects, multiple dispatch — the process of selecting which implementation of a polymorphic operation to call at runtime, and high performance — achieved via type inference and Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, implemented using Low-level Virtual Machine (LLVM).
