Alternatives to Julia
A fast, dynamically typed programming language for technical and scientific computing. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Julia
A fast, dynamically typed programming language for technical and scientific computing.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Julia.
Python
A general-purpose programming language used for scripting, web backends, data analysis and machine learning.
Python has a much larger package ecosystem and is the default for data and machine learning, but it runs much slower than Julia's LLVM-compiled code for CPU-heavy work.
R
A free software environment and language for statistical computing and graphics.
R focuses on statistical computing and graphics, with packages from CRAN and Bioconductor, and it has language quirks that programmers coming from Julia will need time to learn.
SageMath
A free open-source mathematics system built on NumPy, SciPy, Maxima, GAP and many other packages.
SageMath is a free mathematics system that combines many libraries behind a Python-based language, and on Windows it needs the Windows Subsystem for Linux to run.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Jupyter
Browser-based notebooks, JupyterLab and the classic Notebook, that combine live code, text and visualizations.
JupyterLab
A web-based interactive environment for notebooks, code and data, used widely in data science.
Positron
A free data science IDE for Python and R from the makers of RStudio.
marimo
Reactive Python notebook stored as a plain script.
Spyder
An open-source Python IDE for scientific work with a variable explorer and an IPython console.
RStudio
A free, open-source IDE for R with a data viewer, environment pane and support for Python and SQL.
