Julia's for loops are comparable to C in performance, and its vectorized operations are comparable to Numpy/R, although some cases can be optimized using https://github.com/lindahua/Devectorize.jl (see the benchmarks table)
http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2013/12/22/the-relati...
had worried me a couple of years ago. JMW shows that vectorized was much slower also in Julia (though still both faster than R - but that's not difficult).
Glad to see Julia is very fast in both cases, though it's still somewhat perplexing the extent to which vectorized code is necessarily slower. I'm thinking that the future of GPU enabled languages will mean vectorized code will be faster, so I prefer languages with a bias towards vectorisation.
The vectorized code typically allocates all kinds of intermediate results (more GC, more memory accesses). Apparently, turning it into loops is less trivial than it seems.
I'm thinking that the future of GPU enabled languages will mean vectorized code will be faster, so I prefer languages with a bias towards vectorisation.
I share that concern. Julia has some libraries to support GPU programming, but I don't know of any plans to have the core compiler take advantage of it.