- Julia is a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language.
- While it is a general purpose language and can be used to write any application, many of its features are well-suited for high-performance numerical analysis and computational science.
- Distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism in a dynamic programming language; with multiple dispatch as its core programming paradigm.
- Julia supports concurrent, (composable) parallel and distributed computing (with or without using MPI and/or the built-in corresponding to "OpenMP-style" threads), and direct calling of C and Fortran libraries without glue code.
- A just-in-time compiler that is referred to as "just-ahead-of-time" in the Julia community is used.
- Julia is garbage-collected uses eager evaluation, and includes efficient libraries for floating-point calculations, linear algebra, random number generation, and regular expression matching.
- Many libraries are available, including some (e.g., for fast Fourier transforms) that were previously bundled with Julia and are now separate.
- Julia programs by typing directly in the REPL Read–Eval–Print Loop (REPL)