F# vs Julia

Overview

Stacks779

Followers556

Votes399

GitHub Stars2.2K

Forks316

Julia

Stacks666

Followers677

Votes171

GitHub Stars47.9K

Forks5.7K

F# vs Julia: What are the differences?

<Introduction> F# and Julia are both powerful programming languages with unique features and strengths. Understanding the key differences between the two can help developers choose the right tool for their projects.

Purpose and Paradigm: F# is primarily a functional-first language that runs on the .NET platform, whereas Julia is designed for high-performance numerical and scientific computing with a focus on speed and ease of use.
Syntax and Expressiveness: F# follows a more traditional ML-style syntax with indentation-based structure, while Julia adopts a more flexible syntax with support for multiple dispatch, which allows for more expressive and concise code.
Tooling and Ecosystem: F# has strong integration with Visual Studio and extensive support for Microsoft tools and libraries, making it a popular choice for .NET developers. On the other hand, Julia has a growing ecosystem of packages and tools specifically tailored for numerical computing, machine learning, and data science.
Performance and Compilation: Julia is known for its high performance through just-in-time (JIT) compilation, allowing it to rival the speed of low-level languages like C and Fortran. F#, being a managed language, may not offer the same level of performance optimization in certain scenarios.
Community and Adoption: F# has a mature community and is widely used in enterprise applications, particularly within the finance and domain-driven design sectors. Julia, on the other hand, is gaining popularity in the scientific and academic communities due to its performance and versatility.
Learning Curve and Accessibility: F# might be easier for developers coming from a C# or functional programming background to pick up, whereas Julia's dynamic nature and emphasis on numerical computing may present a steeper learning curve for those not familiar with scientific computing concepts.

In Summary, Understanding the differences in purpose, syntax, tooling, performance, community, and learning curve can help developers make an informed decision between using F# and Julia for their projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on F#, Julia

Markus

Feb 3, 2021

Needs adviceon

Kotlin

Java

Hi there. I want to expand my coding toolset. So I want to learn a second backend language besides Kotlin. Kotlin is fantastic. I love it in every aspect, and I think I can never return to Java. And also why should I? It is 100% interoperable with java and can co-exist in every project.

So my question here is. Which language do you think will bring me more joy? I think F#; it is more like Kotlin. Then C# (it's more or like 100% java). But, let's say I learn F#. Is it 100% interoperable like Kotlin? can they live side by side? Can I, then, apply to .NET jr jobs after a while, for example, or is C# the holy cow? I would like to learn .Net.

If it is the worst and only C# is acceptable, then which language should I learn? Dart? Golang?

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Comments

Alexander

Senior researcher at MIPT

Oct 27, 2020

Decided

After writing a project in Julia we decided to stick with Kotlin. Julia is a nice language and has superb REPL support, but poor tooling and the lack of reproducibility of the program runs makes it too expensive to work with. Kotlin on the other hand now has nice Jupyter support, which mostly covers REPL requirements.

188k views188k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

F#	Julia
F# is a mature, open source, cross-platform, functional-first programming language. It empowers users and organizations to tackle complex computing problems with simple, maintainable and robust code.	Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 2.2K	GitHub Stars 47.9K
GitHub Forks 316	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 779	Stacks 666
Followers 556	Followers 677
Votes 399	Votes 171
Pros & Cons
Pros 53 Pattern-matching 42 Makes programming fun again 38 Type providers 32 Delightful 30 Frictionless Cons 3 Microsoft tend to ignore F# preferring to hype C# 2 Interop between C# can sometimes be difficult 1 Type Providers can be unstable in larger solutions 1 Hype	Pros 25 Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation 22 Designed for parallelism and distributed computation 19 Free and Open Source 17 Dynamic Type System 17 Calling C functions directly Cons 5 Immature library management system 4 Slow program start 3 Poor backwards compatibility 3 JIT compiler is very slow 2 Bad tooling
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub Azure Web App for Containers GitLab Slack C++ Rust C lang Stack Overflow vscode.dev Python

What are some alternatives to F#, Julia?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Related Comparisons

F# vs Julia: What are the differences?

Purpose and Paradigm: F# is primarily a functional-first language that runs on the .NET platform, whereas Julia is designed for high-performance numerical and scientific computing with a focus on speed and ease of use.
Syntax and Expressiveness: F# follows a more traditional ML-style syntax with indentation-based structure, while Julia adopts a more flexible syntax with support for multiple dispatch, which allows for more expressive and concise code.
Tooling and Ecosystem: F# has strong integration with Visual Studio and extensive support for Microsoft tools and libraries, making it a popular choice for .NET developers. On the other hand, Julia has a growing ecosystem of packages and tools specifically tailored for numerical computing, machine learning, and data science.
Performance and Compilation: Julia is known for its high performance through just-in-time (JIT) compilation, allowing it to rival the speed of low-level languages like C and Fortran. F#, being a managed language, may not offer the same level of performance optimization in certain scenarios.
Community and Adoption: F# has a mature community and is widely used in enterprise applications, particularly within the finance and domain-driven design sectors. Julia, on the other hand, is gaining popularity in the scientific and academic communities due to its performance and versatility.
Learning Curve and Accessibility: F# might be easier for developers coming from a C# or functional programming background to pick up, whereas Julia's dynamic nature and emphasis on numerical computing may present a steeper learning curve for those not familiar with scientific computing concepts.

F# vs Julia

Overview