Julia High Performance - Second Edition

Multiple dispatch

If there were one unifying strand throughout the design of the Julia language, it would be multiple dispatch. Simply put, dispatch is the process of selecting a function to be executed at runtime. Multiple dispatch, then, is the method of determining the function to be called based on the types of the parameters of the function. Thus, one of the most important uses of types in Julia programs is to arrange the appropriate method dispatch by specifying the types of function arguments.

Note that this is different from the concept of method overloading. Method overloading happens on types known at compile time, while dispatch happens on the actual types of values at runtime.

Dispatch is a runtime process, while method overloading ...