Being designed to be fast. Lots of other high level languages were designed with the assumption that performance critical code would be written in low-level lan

Being designed to be fast. Lots of other high level languages were designed with the assumption that performance critical code would be written in low-level languages so they didn't bother designing the language to make various optimzations possible. Julia was designed for people who don't want to use a low level language for speed. It took a lot of great ideas from languages like Common Lisp, Fortran, etc. as well as a few good ideas of its own and packaged them together in a rather novel way. The language is dynamic, but it's dynamism is limited in specific ways that makes it very easy for the compiler to optimize code.