Matlab delegates a lot of heavy lifting to native routines like MKL and otherwise has a JIT for user code. For workloads which fit on a single workstation, it's

Matlab delegates a lot of heavy lifting to native routines like MKL and otherwise has a JIT for user code. For workloads which fit on a single workstation, it's usually a reasonable performer, for a lot less effort than the alternatives. That said it costs too much and doesn't scale well to multimachine workloads. The language is also quite quirky by modern standards.