I do think I’ll create separate threads from my earlier post, but let me make a final-final comment. When we (Coreform) needed to choose a language to serve as our user-subroutine interface for our (in-development) isogeometric analysis solver (in the field of FEM), we chose Julia (although our codebase is otherwise C++).
The “granddaddy codes” typically use Fortran/C for their subroutines, which are used to define custom material models, element formulations, boundary conditions, etc. So users (typically younger users who’ve learned Matlab or Python) have the challenge of learning Fortran/C and manually compiling their code prior to execution – not always trivial to make sure you’re using the right compiler, and you need to compile for each operating system you want to run on (common to “develop” with GUI tools on Windows, simulate full-scale problem on Linux). And of course then there’s the question of how do you debug your code - from stepping through a debugger, to plotting the function, to benchmarking / profiling your code. Even six years ago, when we were just beginning to spec out our code, it was clear that Julia was the best language for our user-subroutines: the best blend of ease-of-use and performance.
Just a simple example, from our “booth” video that we share at conferences we attend (go to 1:40 if the timestamp in the link doesn’t work):
I hope you’ll excuse my self-promotion, but I thought it would be an uplifting note to mention its use.
EDIT: And what finally convinced me of Julia being the perfect fit was the response from this community on a question I asked back in 2018. Even though I’d been dabbling in Julia for three years at that point, that was the first time I finally saw the full potential of Julia. So what’s one step the Julia community should take, you ask? Answer: Keep on answering user’s Discourse questions, knocking them out of the park with the power and simplicity of Julia. Any user can do this, I know that I personally am quite hesitant to contribute to source, but I can certainly try to answer other user’s questions.