I've been following Julia with great interest (and a lot of respect), but one thing that I don't fully understand is why it is so fast.
For example, let's compare it to R, which is mainly written in C (and a bit of Fortran). On the other hand (according to Wikipedia), Julia's core is implemented in C and C++ (similar to R), its parser in Scheme, and the LLVM compiler framework is used for just-in-time generation of machine code. Scheme is probably *not* the main reason why Julia is so fast, and whether one uses C or C++ probably does *not* matter much as well (in terms of speed). That leaves LLVM. So what's so special about it? If I get R to use LLVM (which is probably not easy, but let's just speak in hypotheticals), could I also get a speed comparable to Julia? Thanks, M
