The beauty of Julia is in its design as a language. This is what gives people hope that the tooling and ecosystem will emerge -- they all seem easier to develop

The beauty of Julia is in its design as a language. This is what gives people hope that the tooling and ecosystem will emerge -- they all seem easier to develop in Julia than in other languages, thanks to multiple dispatch, the type system, and powerful metaprogramming abilities. As far as fast bare metal languages go, you can write extremely general optimized matrix multiplication libraries in Julia. For matrices that fit in the L2 cache, I achieved performance similar to Intel MKL, but with far more generic code. https://discourse.julialang.org/t/we-can-write-an-optimized-blas-library-in-pure-julia-please-skip-op-and-jump-to-post-4/11634/4?u=elrod https://discourse.julialang.org/t/we-can-write-an-optimized-... Writing a kernel in C means using SIMD intrinsics, where function names and types differ for every vector size, and then different numbers/sets of calls for each kernel (you'd want several sizes per architecture). Compare this to Julia, where parametric typing and multiple dispatch mean you only need one set of functions, and using an @generated function will generate whatever kernels you happen to need at compile time. Looking into the future, awesome projects like Cassete speak to the potential of what's possible: https://github.com/jrevels/Cassette.jl https://github.com/jrevels/Cassette.jl Cassete promises to let you do anything from getting automatic differentiation for arbitrary Julia code, even if it is strictly typed and buried in a chain of dependencies of the library you're using and written by someone who never imagined the idea of autodiff, to injecting custom compiler passes. Also, while I haven't tried it yet, many seem to like: https://github.com/timholy/Rebugger.jl https://github.com/timholy/Rebugger.jl Julia is more promise than practice right now, but that's largely because of just how much it promises. I (and many others) think it has done a great job delivering so far. That's why there's excitement, and why many are starting to embrace it.