On Friday, May 1, 2015 at 1:23:40 PM UTC-4, Steven G. Johnson wrote: > > On Friday, May 1, 2015 at 1:12:00 PM UTC-4, Steven Sagaert wrote: >> >> That wasn't what I was saying. I like the philosophy behind julia. But in >> practice (as of now) even in julia you still have to code in a certain >> style if you want very good performance and that's no different than in any >> other language. >> > > The goal of Julia is not to be a language in which it is *impossible* to > write slow code, or a language in which all programming styles are equally > fast. The goal (or at least, one of the goals) is to be an expressive, > high-level dynamic language, in which it is also *possible* to write > performance-critical inner-loop code. >
Yep, totally agree! I had to deal with people (smart people too, who went to MIT also ;-) ) who expected the compiler/interpreter to magically improve their O(n^2) code! > That *is* different from other high-level languages, in which it is > typically *not* possible to write performance-critical inner-loop code > without dropping down to a lower-level language (C, Fortran, Cython...). > If you are coding exclusively in Python or R, and there isn't an optimized > function appropriate for the innermost loops of your task at hand, you are > out of luck. > Also, very true... I do hope that any issues that make my C version of UTF conversion routines faster than my equivalent Julia versions will be addressed before too long. (and I don't even think it is that far off, or hard for any particular reason)
