Julia (programming language)

Julia is a high-level, general-purpose dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science. Distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism in a dynamic programming language; with multiple dispatch as its core programming paradigm. Julia supports concurrent, (composable) parallel and distributed computing (with or without using MPI or the built-in corresponding to "OpenMP-style" threads), and direct calling of C and Fortran libraries without glue code. Julia uses a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that is referred to as "just-ahead-of-time" (JAOT) in the Julia community, as Julia compiles all code (by default) to machine code before running it. Julia is garbage-collected, uses eager evaluation, and includes efficient libraries for floating-point calculations, linear algebra, random number generation, and regular expression matching. Many libraries are available, including some (e.g., for fast Fourier transforms) that were previously bundled with Julia and are now separate. Julia can work with other languages, e.g. has special (keyword) support for calling C language libraries; and e.g. for working with Python, R, Rust, C++, SQL with use of extra packages and to work with or even to compile Julia code to JavaScript. Julia can be compiled to binary executables using a package for it supporting all Julia features. Small binary executables can also be made using a different package but then the Julia runtime is not included in the executable, e.g. down to 9 KB (then without e.g. the garbage collector since it is part of Julia's runtime, i.e. with similar limited capabilities to the C language), for computers or even microcontrollers, such as Arduino with 2 KB of RAM. By default, Julia code depends on the Julia runtime to support all Julia features, e.g. threading, but some (non-idiomatic, to smaller or larger degree) Julia code can be compiled to small executables (with limited Julia capabilities). In both cases no source code needs to be distributed.