Julia: High Performance Programming

How fast can Julia be?

The best evidence of Julia's performance claims is when you write your own code. However, we can provide an indication of how fast Julia can be by comparing a similar algorithm over multiple languages.

As an example, let's consider a very simple routine to calculate the power sum for a series, as follows:

The following code runs this computation in Julia 500 times:

function pisum()
    sum = 0.0
    for j = 1:500
        sum = 0.0
        for k = 1:10000
            sum += 1.0/(k*k)
        end
    end
    sum
end

You will notice that this code contains no type annotations. It should look quite familiar to any modern dynamic language. The same algorithm implemented in C would look ...