This year marks the consolidation of Julia (https://julialang.org/), a programming language designed for scientific computing, as the last version before 1.0 has just been released (0.7). Among its main features, expressiveness and high execution speeds are the most prominent: the performance of Julia code is similar to statically compiled languages, yet Julia provides a nice interactive shell and fully supports Jupyter; moreover, it can transparently call external codes written in C, Fortran, and even Python without the need of wrappers. The usage of Julia in the astronomical community is growing, and a GitHub organization named JuliaAstro takes care of coordinating the development of packages. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Julia and JuliaAstro. We will also provide a real-life example by discussing the implementation of a Julia-only simulation pipeline for a large-scale CMB experiment.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): O4-5.pdf