A major distinguishing point of any programming language is how it deals with concurrency.Programmers want to extract the best throughput possible for their applications, but it is well known that taking advantage of all available CPU cores correctly and efficiently is hard.Here, we look at how JuliaLang unleashes the full power of a modern CPU's multiple cores.One of our key considerations is to reduce the programmer's burden.We will discuss how JuliaLang aims to provide a range of modern primitives that are designed to automatically compose effectively, and some of the trade-offs we make to try to simplify the mental model for the programmer.We'll also briefly discuss our thoughts on future development.

Julia is a programming language for the scientific community that combines features of productivity languages, such as Python or MATLAB, with characteristics of performance-oriented languages, such as C++ or Fortran. Julia's productivity features include: dynamic typing, automatic memory management, rich type annotations, and multiple dispatch. At the same time, Julia allows programmers to control memory layout and leverages a specializing just-in-time compiler to eliminate much of the overhead of those features. This paper details the design choices made by the creators of Julia and reflects on the implications of those choices for performance and usability.

type Number end abstract type Real <: Number endtype Real <: Number end primitive type Int64 <: Signed 64 end struct Polar{T<:Real} <: Number r::T t::T end The code shown is an extract of Julia’s numeric tower. Number is an abstract type with no declared supertype, which means Any is its super type. Real is also abstract but has Number as its super type. Int64 is a primitive type with Signed as its supertype; it is represented in 64 bits. The struct Polar{T<:Real} is a subtype of Number with two fields of type T bounded by Real. Run-time checks ensure that values stored in these fields are of the declared type. When types are omitted from field Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Vol. 1, No. OOPSLA, Article 00. Publication date: 2018.

Programming languages that support multiple dispatch rely on an expressive notion of subtyping to specify method applicability. In these languages, type annotations on method declarations are used to select, out of a potentially large set of methods, the one that is most appropriate for a particular tuple of arguments. Julia is a language for scientific computing built around multiple dispatch and an expressive subtyping relation. This paper provides the first formal definition of Julia's subtype relation and motivates its design. We validate our specification empirically with an implementation of our definition that we compare against the existing Julia implementation on a collection of real-world programs. Our subtype implementation differs on 122 subtype tests out of 6,014,476. The first 120 differences are due to a bug in Julia that was fixed once reported; the remaining 2 are under discussion.

Technical computing is a challenging application area for programming languages to address. This is evinced by the unusually large number of specialized languages in the area (e.g. MATLAB, R), and the complexity of common software stacks, often involving multiple languages and custom code generators. We believe this is ultimately due to key characteristics of the domain: highly complex operators, a need for extensive code specialization for performance, and a desire for permissive high-level programming styles allowing productive experimentation. The Julia language attempts to provide a more effective structure for this kind of programming by allowing programmers to express complex polymorphic behaviors using dynamic multiple dispatch over parametric types. The forms of extension and reuse permitted by this paradigm have proven valuable for technical computing. We report on how this approach has allowed domain experts to express useful abstractions while simultaneously providing a natural path to better performance for high-level technical code.

Bridging cultures that have often been distant, Julia combines expertise from the diverse fields of computer science and computational science to create a new approach to numerical computing. Julia is designed to be easy and fast and questions notions generally held to be “laws of nature” by practitioners of numerical computing: 1. High-level dynamic programs have to be slow. 2. One must prototype in one language and then rewrite in another language for speed or deployment. 3. There are parts of a system appropriate for the programmer, and other parts that are best left untouched as they have been built by the experts. We introduce the Julia programming language and its design—a dance between specialization and abstraction. Specialization allows for custom treatment. Multiple dispatch, a technique from computer science, picks the right algorithm for the right circumstance. Abstraction, which is what good computation is really about, recognizes what remains the same after differences are stripped away. Abstractions in mathematics are captured as code through another technique from computer science, generic programming. Julia shows that one can achieve machine performance without sacrificing human convenience.

Bridging cultures that have often been distant, Julia combines expertise from the diverse fields of computer science and computational science to create a new approach to numerical computing. Julia is designed to be easy and fast. Julia questions notions generally held as "laws of nature" by practitioners of numerical computing: 1. High-level dynamic programs have to be slow. 2. One must prototype in one language and then rewrite in another language for speed or deployment, and 3. There are parts of a system for the programmer, and other parts best left untouched as they are built by the experts. We introduce the Julia programming language and its design — a dance between specialization and abstraction. Specialization allows for custom treatment. Multiple dispatch, a technique from computer science, picks the right algorithm for the right circumstance. Abstraction, what good computation is really about, recognizes what remains the same after differences are stripped away. Abstractions in mathematics are captured as code through another technique from computer science, generic programming. Julia shows that one can have machine performance without sacrificing human convenience.