Both C and Julia are compiled to machine code before they are executed. C is compiled Ahead Of Time, and Julia compiles new code as it runs, Just In Time, whenever a function is called with argument types it hasn't seen before.
Parts of Julia's library and compiler are implemented in C, but this actually isn't very relevant to the speed of the generated machine code that actually runs.
Statements about Julia being "on par" with C mean that if you write code in a straightforward way to solve some problem, e.g. "find the three largest even integers in a collection," then Julia is capable of generating machine code that executes with efficiency "on par" with the machine code that C generates.
The "straightforward" part in the last paragraph is actually important. You could in principle solve this problem in any language by writing your own machine code generator in that language, and then the distinction between efficiency of different languages breaks down. But usually you won't do that, and so usually the distinction does have some meaning.
Because Julia has been carefully designed to allow functions to compile down to very fast machine code. There are a few important design choices that are necessary to make it possible to do this (type stability, etc) - there are a few talks about the design principles that went into making Julia.
However, numerical Python can be nearly as fast as C as well with very, very little additional work (using Numba means adding @jit on top of a function). The downside is that Numba only works on the 'numpy' subset of Python, basically.
You could, of course, just download a Julia distribution, fire up the interpreter and see for yourself. But I'm sure unfounded snark is much, much better.
If you want to know the catch, it is that it has high latency at first run, and requires a full compiler at runtime. It is optimized for numerical work, where the long runtime make slow startup irrelevant and low latency is easily amortized.
But if you are suspicious, there are introspection utilities that let you see the generated native code. Give it a try.
Oh wow, another person evangelizing about X obscure language from inside their pseudoacademic ivory tower yet providing no examples of anything useful they've done with it, or anyone has done with it for that matter.
It's fine to say something more reasonable like "I have high hopes for this very early stage language in the future", but this kind of fanfare is the reason why stuff like Java got so big.
I'm not really sure what the point of this post is. Julia is a fun language to play with, it has a great and very helpful community and, in its niche, it's very good. Its creators have been very good OSS citizens and joined forces with IPython.
If you don't like it, don't use, but don't piss and moan about the fact that some people enjoy it.
During the entire time that Microsoft held this so-called monopoly---which was at most a monopoly on the desktop, not the servers or networks that most people think of as comprising "the internet"---Linux and other unix-like OSes continually made progress and now power the vast majority of the systems that provide the internet and indeed the devices we use to access it (tablets and phones).
I'm not persuaded that Microsoft substantially held back the internet. IE of a decade ago was not a great browser by today's standards, but the hardware of the time could not have really supported the javascript-heavy apps that we take for granted today. I occasionally use gmail and google maps on a G4 powerbook with a "modern" browser (TenFourFox), and it's pretty painful. It almost feels like being back on a 48K dial-up ISP service. And let's not forget that Microsoft invented (or at least had the first browser support for) the scriptable XMLHttpRequest, the foundation for almost all of the asynchronous web apps that we use today. In fact way back in IE 5 (with the MSXML ActiveX plugin) you could build rich, responsive interfaces and asynchronous interaction using XML, XSLT, and scripting YEARS before you could do it in any other browser.
The idiom "nice guys finish last" isn't an idiom for no reason, Paul. Just because you're good at picking out people who you want to give money and support to doesn't mean that their niceness has any correlation with the hundreds of other founders who you don't, much less the business world in general.
I've read most of pg's essays and he seems to contradict himself a lot:
From this one:
"There is also a complementary force at work: if you want to build great things, it helps to be driven by a spirit of benevolence. The startup founders who end up richest are not the ones driven by money. The ones driven by money take the big acquisition offer that nearly every successful startup gets en route. [1] The ones who keep going are driven by something else. They may not say so explicitly, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Which means people with a desire to improve the world have a natural advantage. [2]"
From "Why there aren't more Googles":
"Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
Google, despite serious interest from Microsoft and Yahoo—what must have seemed like lucrative interest at the time—didn't sell out. Google might simply have been nothing but Yahoo's or MSN's search box.
Why isn't it? Because Google had a deeply felt sense of purpose: a conviction to change the world for the better.
This has a nice sound to it, but it isn't true. Google's founders were willing to sell early on. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.
It was the same with Facebook. They would have sold, but Yahoo blew it by offering too little.
Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]"
Though, I guess when you're that rich you can't help but think that anything that comes out of your mouth is a golden gospel, even if it is at odds with your previous statements. It sure is easy to play the whole holier-than-thou "I don't care about money I care about changing the world" game when you're already loaded.
I think you're being too harsh on this one. We live in a extremely complex world, and he's writing about something that 's (IMO) a multi-dimensional space. Am not clear about seeing the inconsistency(in this case) , nevertheless, in such complex spaces, inconsistent statements might result from an attempt to be complete.(Godels' theorem relevant here??).
The inconsistency is that I don't think anyone would say Google isn't one of the most if not THE most successful web era companies, and according to pg the founders weren't driven by a "spirit of benevolence" which in the current essay in question he attributes the most successful founders with.
>>Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain.
This one mad me laugh, sounds like is just asking for more money :-)
Google confounds me. They are one of the largest tech companies as far as just pure reach, they own the top search engine, email service, and mobile operating system, as well as a host of other properties both hardware and software(and a huge pile of money that they're sitting on), yet still to this day make 99% of their revenue from assaulting people with ads on Youtube and in their search results. They attempted to get into hardware by buying Motorola, but later ended up selling it to Lenovo at a loss. They have the capital and resources to expand into pretty much any field that they so desire(including taking another crack at hardware), so why do they put all their eggs in the advertising basket?
It's pretty telling that in the 20+ years that the Internet has gone mainstream, web companies still haven't found a business model that generates as much revenue as advertising - a lesson that old media learned a long time ago. It boils down to the problem that Internet users are conditioned to expect services for free, and advertising appears to be the only way to provide sustainable "free" services.
How old are you geezers? Do any of you actually use Snapchat/know people who use it? If you did you would know that nobody actually uses it to send nudes because if people get nude photos they would actually like to keep them because surprise surprise - there isn't much you can get done in 10 seconds. The whole sexting thing is a load of drivel concocted by the media because like any good story, it strikes fear into the heart of middle america.
The actual reason it got popular, which a lot of other people in this thread have mentioned as well, is because it was much faster than MMS because the photos were low quality(and at the time I don't think Apple had introduced iMessage), and the photos didn't stick around on your phone after they'd been sent, so it was perfect for sending silly/mundane things that don't need to be preserved.
If companies get swallowed up by the Google/Facebook behemoths like so many do then investors usually get their exit, to make an example of 2 from your list Tumblr was bought for $1bn by Yahoo and Snapchat allegedly had multibillion dollar acquisition offers from Facebook and Google. Apparently the megacompanies don't buy these smaller companies for the value that could be generated by revenue streams from them(when and if), but more a combo of the "strategic advantage" - so their competitors don't snap them up first, or out of a fear that one of them could end up being a direct competitor to them one day, as is the case with the Facebook Instagram acquisition and attempted Snapchat acquisition.
