# MATLAB to Julia wiki

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/matlab-to-julia-wiki/12381>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Created:** [July 14, 2018, 10:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/matlab-to-julia-wiki/12381 "2018-07-14T22:17:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 14

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**Author:** ![Tamas\_Papp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tamas_papp/32/25949_2.png) [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)\
**Post date:** [July 21, 2018, 10:37am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/matlab-to-julia-wiki/12381/14 "2018-07-21T10:37:11Z")

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> [@geoalchimista](#):
>
> If a partial translator (not transpiler) can do the translation of basic syntax

IMO Julia requires a very different approach (small, modular functions, loops or broadcasting instead of vectorization, attention to type stability, etc), so while it is relatively easy to make a “literal translation” of simple Matlab scripts, the performance is often disappointing because of these gotchas. I have seen some people do this and conclude that Julia is super-slow.

Also, while there are of course exceptions to this, many Matlab scripts that I have seen are just badly written from a software engineering perspective — brittle to implicit or hidden assumptions, composed of large, monolithic functions, makign extensive use of global variables, and consequently lacking unit tests.

I am not suggesting that this is a feature of Matlab, but rather the culture that has grown around it, with books listing code snippets as solutions and suggesting that you solve problems by copy-pasting and modifying previous code. There is a lot of Matlab code out there, but perhaps the part that should be saved for posterity should be rewritten. This is in sharp contrast to, say, Fortran code I see floating around: most of it is carefully documented, organized, and tested.

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