Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Understanding dynamic dispatch

Julia's dispatch mechanism is unique not only because of its multiple dispatch features, but also the way that it treats function arguments dynamically when deciding where to dispatch.

 Let's say we want to randomly pick two objects and check whether they collide. We can define the function as follows:

# randomly pick two things and checkfunction check_randomly(things)    for i in 1:5        two = rand(things, 2)        collide(two...)    endend

Let's run it and see what happens:

We can see that different collide methods are called depending on the types of the arguments that are passed in the two variable.

This kind of dynamic ...