Definition of the Language

Julia is a highly efficient high-level language that is designed for the purpose of carrying out numerical and scientific computing. The language can, however, be used for general programming and web use as well. This language has a MIT license which makes it open source. The benefit of operating under such a license is that there is a huge online community where the users gather together and solve the common bugs encountered.

The language uses a syntax familiar to the computing family and therefore, is easy to use and understand. One of the most distinctive features of the languages is the use of parallel execution by its compiler. In addition, the language has the ability to call functions from the C and Fortran libraries without glue code. As a result, the language features a huge number of library functions to be used in numerical computing.

The language also features a very strong compiler that performs close to the statically designed languages such as C and Fortran. The benchmark of Julia compiler returned figures that were better than many of the languages out there. The language is compatible with most of the popular operating systems in the market such as Linux, Windows, OS X and FreeBSD.

History of Julia

The inception of this programming language can be traced back to 2009. The lead developers Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski and Viral Shah started working on creating a language that can be used for better and faster numerical computing. The developers were able to launch a commercial release on February 2012.

Since then, the language has become very popular among the programmers as it provides the ease of many high-level languages with a better performance. The language was launched under a liberal MIT license. This means that Julia is an open source language which can be used and/or modified without any right infringement.

Form its initial launch to date, the language has gone through many changes and many versions have been launched. Starting from version 0.1.2. in early 2012, the version 0.2 was launched on November 2013. Currently, any version older than version 0.3 is not supported or maintained. The latest stable version of the language is 0.4.6 which was released on 19th June 2016.

There is also a beta version of the language which is in circulation. This beta version is called 0.5.0-dev and it is updated daily. The version, however, is not stable since it is in development phase.

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