user2016

Julia, like R, is a dynamic language for scientific computing but, unlike R, it was explicitly designed to deliver performance competitive to traditional batch-compiled languages. To achieve this Julia's designers made a number of unusual choices, including the presence of a set of type annotations that are used for dispatching methods and speed up code, but not for type-checking. The result is that many Julia programs are competitive with equivalent programs written in C. This talk gives a brief overview of the key points of Julia's design and considers whether similar ideas could be adopted in R.