2018/12/04 by M. Tomasi, Mosé Giordano, Tomasi, Maurizio +1
Decision Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Mathematical Software (cs.MS) #Scientific Computing and Data Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.01219
openalex publication_date 2018/12/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This year marks the consolidation of Julia (https://julialang.org/), a programming language designed for scientific computing, as the first stable version (1.0) has been released, in August 2018. Among its main features, expressiveness and high execution speeds are the most prominent: the performance of Julia code is similar to statically compiled languages, yet Julia provides a nice interactive shell and fully supports Jupyter; moreover, it can transparently call external codes written in C, Fortran, and even Python and R without the need of wrappers. The usage of Julia in the astronomical community is growing, and a GitHub organization named JuliaAstro takes care of coordinating the development of packages. In this paper, we present the features and shortcomings of this language and discuss its application in astronomy and astrophysics.