Julia High Performance - Second Edition

The Julia compilation process

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 Julia code is usually not compiled ahead of time to a binary.

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, which is shown in the following diagram:

As the compiler goes through each stage, we can write code to execute at various points along this pipeline rather than everything waiting until the end, which is the traditional runtime. While we might loosely use the ...