Julia (programming language)
Julia (programming language)
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Julia (programming language)

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Julia (programming language)

Julia is a dynamic general-purpose programming language. As a high-level language, distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism, the use of multiple dispatch as a core programming paradigm, just-in-time (JIT) compilation and a parallel garbage collection implementation. Notably Julia does not support classes with encapsulated methods but instead relies on the types of all of a function's arguments to determine which method will be called.

By default, Julia is run similarly to scripting languages, using its runtime, and allows for interactions, but Julia programs/source code can also optionally be sent to users in one ready-to-install/run file, which can be made quickly, not needing anything preinstalled.

Julia programs can reuse libraries from other languages, and vice versa. Julia has interoperability with C, C++, Fortran, Rust, Python, and R. Some Julia packages have bindings for Python and R libraries.

Julia is supported by programmer tools like IDEs (see below) and by notebooks like Pluto.jl, Jupyter, and since 2025 Google Colab officially supports Julia natively.

Julia is sometimes used in embedded systems (e.g. has been used in a satellite in space on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4; 64-bit Pis work best with Julia, and Julia is supported in Raspbian).

Work on Julia began in 2009, when Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah, and Alan Edelman set out to create a free language that was both high-level and fast. On 14 February 2012, the team launched a website with a blog post explaining the language's mission. In an interview with InfoWorld in April 2012, Karpinski said of the name "Julia": "There's no good reason, really. It just seemed like a pretty name." Bezanson said he chose the name on the recommendation of a friend, then years later wrote:

Maybe julia stands for "Jeff's uncommon lisp is automated"?

Julia's syntax is stable, since version 1.0 in 2018, and Julia has a backward compatibility guarantee for 1.x and also a stability promise for the documented (stable) API, while in the years before in the early development prior to 0.7 the syntax (and semantics) was changed in new versions. All of the (registered package) ecosystem uses the new and improved syntax, and in most cases relies on new APIs that have been added regularly, and in some cases minor additional syntax added in a forward compatible way e.g. in Julia 1.7.

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