Hacker News Reader

I tried to get into Julia, but I was put off when it seemed that the language doesn't support vectorization the way that Matlab does, but rather encourages writing your loops explicitly (which is fast due to the LLVM JITC). Yuck.

I am an Octave / Matlab fan myself, and think that Julia/ Python/ R/ etc don't quite hit the sweet spot for matrix driven algorithms and 100-1000 line programs that Matlab does. Call me old fashioned....

View on HN

Julia does support vectorization just like MATLAB, but I think what you may be referring to are some of the speed traps that currently exists where undesireable/unnecessary copies occur. This is often in practice the reason that writing devectorized code is better in Julia right now.

But, this issue is well-identified in the Julia dev community, and is on the roadmap for 0.3: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4853

I was put off when it seemed that the language doesn't support vectorization the way that Matlab does

Yea, coming from matlab it just feels so wrong to write out loops by hand. Fortunately it seems some people are working on trying to solve that here: https://github.com/lindahua/Devectorize.jl

Reply on news.ycombinator.com