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0 pointsreachtarunhere2y ago0 comments

> My experience is a first implementation / novice programmer will write Julia code of a similar speed to python.

No because of JIT compilation he would write code faster than Python by default. Now to truly rival optimized C++ code one has to do the tricks mentioned in this post like optimizing memory access, SIMD and maximizing instruction parallelism.

The key point is you are better off by default and can do some ugly stuff in the critical parts of the code while still using the same language.

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eigenspace2y ago

It really depends on what you end up doing. A lot of "python" code is really just thin wrappers around fairly optimized C routines (although there's inefficiencies from the wrapper, and the optimization barriers), so if you're doing something where the bulk of the work is happening inside those routines, beginner-written julia code will end up being roughly comparable to expert-written numpy code or whatever.

But yeah if you're writing a loop or something else where the majority of work is actually being done by python itself, then it's going to typically be much much slower than the equivalent julia code.

th0ma52y ago

> beginner-written julia code will end up being roughly comparable to expert-written numpy code or whatever

This is not possible by definition, or is a misunderstanding of where and how performance occurs. If this is possible, then it is just as easy to perform worse if the beginner steps to either side of the happy path or if their problem doesn't fit the preconceived optimizations and is therefore no longer a "language" but some kind of "library". I think Julia should be seen as a library and not a language because a language is not comparable in this way that Julia likes to handwave away as magic.

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eigenspace2y ago

th0ma52y ago

> beginner-written julia code will end up being roughly comparable to expert-written numpy code or whatever

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