Julia: High Performance Programming

Using macros for performance

So far in this chapter, we have focused on making our functions run faster. However, as fast we make them, all the computation occurs when a function is called. The best way to make any code faster is, however, to do less work. So, a strategy is to move any possible work to compile time, which leaves less work to do at runtime.

The Julia compilation process

However, for a dynamic language such as Julia, the terms compile time and runtime are not always clearly defined. In some sense, everything happens at runtime because our code is not compiled to a binary ahead of time. However, there are clearly divided processes that occur from when the code is read from disk to when it is finally executed on the CPU.

As the compiler ...