Speed of Julia vs. Fortran and other languages

General Usage Performance
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This one has been discussed here: Why is this raytracer slow?

The conclusion were:

  1. The time reported for Julia there does not really make sense. The code that is there, as is, runs in about 2x the time of the Fortran code (including Julia startup and compilation). Thus one would expect that a time of ~320 ms would be reported in that table (not 900ms).

  2. There are some algorithmic differences, particularly in the fact that for the Fortran code there is only "one type* of “thing”, while in the Julia code there are different types of “things” in the scene. That introduces some type instabilities and run-time dispatch issues that make the Julia code slower.

  3. The algorithms being equal, the final running time is dependent on the number of objects of the scene, and the Julia code becomes as fast as the Nim one (which has very low-level optimizations) and faster than the Fortran code for about 10 objects.

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