Modern Scientific Computing with Julia

Preface

Julia is a modern programming language that was specifically developed for scientific computing. By combining a high-level syntax with just-in-time compilation, Julia achieves high efficiency both in terms of development time and code execution time. Its unique features facilitate the development of general, modular, extensible and thus reusable code. Julia encourages good software development practices as tools for documentation, tests, and version control are already built into the language and its ecosystem.

Julia is a multi-paradigm programming language that lends itself both to functional and object-oriented programming patterns. Although Julia is not class-based like Python or C++, its main paradigm, multiple dispatch, and its dynamic type system provide a very powerful and extremely effective way of programming. Generally speaking, multiple dispatch tends to be more flexible and expressive than class-based object orientism and better suited for scientific software development.

Julia’s type system is well suited for building abstraction layers which together with multiple dispatch facilitate and simplify

• targeted and incremental manual optimizations,
  
• advanced automatic optimizations by the compiler,
  
• programming of heterogeneous architectures,
  
• development of domain-specific languages,
  
• sophisticated techniques like automatic differentiation and differentiable programming.

These are some of the topics covered in this book.

Status

Chapters 1-3 are mostly finished and Chapter 4 is approximately 50% done (28.02.2024).