What is Java?
Java is one of the most popular and widely used programming language and platform. A platform is an environment that helps to develop and run programs written in any programming language. Julia is a high level, high performance, dynamic programming language. In this article, the difference between both languages is discussed.
Java is a class-based object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling in 1995. It is designed in order to make a language platform free ie write once run anywhere(WORA). It has a complex syntax similar to that of C/C++ having slower execution speed. However, it is secure and trustworthy. It provides various applications like Image processing, Mobile and desktop application development, enterprise applications web development, client-server application and many more. It contains a huge amount of libraries and APIs having the ability to perform almost every task.
What is Julia?
Julia is an open-source dynamic programming language developed by a group of 4 people at MIT in 2012. It is designed in order to provide a language with a combination of easy and user-friendly syntax as well as high execution speed. It is focused to enhance the execution speed for scientific and statistical computations as well as data analysis. It works efficiently for parallel and distributed computing. It has a key feature called multiple dispatches useful in various mathematical and scientific codes. It plays an important role in cloud computing and analysing Big data. The built-ins in Julia are much fast and snug than that of user-defined types. The Julia Read-Eval-Print Loop(REPL) provides quick testing about the behaviour of code and allows documentation and package management instantly in the REPL. Hence, It can be concluded that Julia defeats Java in syntax, speed and applications.
The following table demonstrates the difference between Java and Julia:
| Features | Julia | Java |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Julia is faster than Java as it has execution speed very similar to that of C/C++. | Java, on the other hand is fast but is slower in comparison to C/C++. |
| Syntax | Julia has a user-friendly syntax which is much easier than Java | Java has a complex syntax and difficult to understand than that of Julia |
| Libraries | Julia has limited sets of libraries. However, in order to make code simple and efficient, it can call libraries from C and Fortran. | Java has numerous sets of libraries to work upon. |
| Community | Being a young language, Julia has less popularity and hence it has less number of users than java. However, it is considered to be the future language in the field of data analytics | Java has a vast community due to its high popularity for web and android app development. |
| Code Conversion | Julia has syntax like python, hence hard to convert code directly from languages like C/C++. | Java has syntax like C/C++, hence hard to convert code directly from languages like python. |
| Dynamically Typed | Julia is a dynamic but weekly typed language having some benefits of static typed languages | Java is a static and strongly typed language where variables can be an object or just a type. |
| Array Indexing | Julia is a language where array indexing starts from 1. | Java, like most of the other programming languages, starts its array indexing from 0. |
