Book Image

Julia High Performance

By : Avik Sengupta
Book Image

Julia High Performance

By: Avik Sengupta

Overview of this book

Julia is a high performance, high-level dynamic language designed to address the requirements of high-level numerical and scientific computing. Julia brings solutions to the complexities faced by developers while developing elegant and high performing code. Julia High Performance will take you on a journey to understand the performance characteristics of your Julia programs, and enables you to utilize the promise of near C levels of performance in Julia. You will learn to analyze and measure the performance of Julia code, understand how to avoid bottlenecks, and design your program for the highest possible performance. In this book, you will also see how Julia uses type information to achieve its performance goals, and how to use multuple dispatch to help the compiler to emit high performance machine code. Numbers and their arrays are obviously the key structures in scientific computing – you will see how Julia’s design makes them fast. The last chapter will give you a taste of Julia’s distributed computing capabilities.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 3. Types in Julia

Julia is a dynamically typed language in which, unlike languages such as Java or C, the programmer does not need to specify the fixed type of every variable in the program. Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, Julia achieves its impressive performance characteristics by inferring and using type information for all the data in the program. In this chapter, we will start with a brief look at the type system in the language and then explain how to use this type system to write high-performance code.

  • The Julia type system

  • Type-stability

  • Types at storage locations