Julia is a dynamic general-purpose programming language. As a high-level language, distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism, the use of multiple dispatch as a core programming paradigm, just-in-time (JIT) compilation and a parallel garbage collection implementation. Notably Julia does not support classes with encapsulated methods but instead relies on the types of all of a function's arguments to determine which method will be called.
By default, Julia is run similarly to scripting languages, using its runtime, and allows for interactions,[19] but Julia programs/source code can also optionally be sent to users in one ready-to-install/run file, which can be made quickly, not needing anything preinstalled.[20]
Julia programs can reuse libraries from other languages (or itself be reused from other); Julia has a special no-boilerplate keyword allowing calling e.g. C, Fortran or Rust libraries, and e.g. PythonCall.jl uses it indirectly for you, and Julia (libraries) can also be called from other languages, e.g. Python and R, and several Julia packages have been made easily available from those languages, in the form of Python and R libraries for corresponding Julia packages. Calling in either direction has been implemented for many languages, not just those and C++.
Julia is supported by programmer tools like IDEs (see below) and by notebooks like Pluto.jl, Jupyter, and since 2025 Google Colab officially supports Julia natively.
Julia is sometimes used in embedded systems (e.g. has been used in a satellite in space on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4; 64-bit Pis work best with Julia, and Julia is supported in Raspbian).[21]
Julia's generated functions are closely related to the multistaged programming (MSP) paradigm popularized by Taha and Sheard, which generalizes the compile time/run time stages of program execution by allowing for multiple stages of delayed code execution.
we have shown the performance to approach and even sometimes exceed that of CUDA C on a selection of applications from the Rodinia benchmark suite
He has co-designed the programming language Scheme, which has greatly influenced the design of Julia
PackageCompiler.jl
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AppBundler.jl
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Julia works on all the Pi variants, we recommend using the Pi 3.