Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ruby VS Julia

Compare Ruby VS Julia and see what are their differences

Ruby logo Ruby

A dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity

Julia logo Julia

Julia is a sophisticated programming language designed especially for numerical computing with specializations in analysis and computational science. It is also efficient for web use, general programming, and can be used as a specification language.
  • Ruby Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

We recommend LibHunt Ruby for discovery and comparisons of trending Ruby projects.

  • Julia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15

We recommend LibHunt Julia for discovery and comparisons of trending Julia projects.

Ruby features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Ruby is designed with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Its syntax is easy to read and write, which makes it accessible for beginners as well as enjoyable for seasoned developers.
  • Rich Libraries
    Ruby boasts a large ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, which speed up the development process and provide robust solutions for common tasks.
  • Community Support
    Ruby has a vibrant and active community, which means lots of resources, gems (libraries), and forums are available for learning and problem-solving.
  • Dynamic Typing
    Ruby's dynamic typing allows for more flexible and rapid development, as it doesn't require variable type declarations and allows for more expressive code.
  • Meta-Programming
    Ruby has powerful meta-programming capabilities that allow developers to write more abstract and flexible code, reducing repetition and improving code maintainability.

Possible disadvantages of Ruby

  • Performance
    Ruby is generally slower compared to languages like C, Java, and Go. This can be a significant drawback for applications where performance is critically important.
  • Concurrency
    While Ruby has some support for concurrency, it is not as robust as in other languages like Java or Erlang. This can be a limitation for highly concurrent applications.
  • Memory Usage
    Ruby applications tend to consume more memory compared to those written in other languages, which can be a drawback for large-scale applications or resource-constrained environments.
  • Not Suitable for All Types of Applications
    While Ruby excels in web development, particularly with Ruby on Rails, it may not be the best choice for system-level programming, real-time systems, or applications requiring fine-grained control over hardware.
  • Dependency on Gems
    While the rich ecosystem of gems is a strength, it can also be a downside. Over-reliance on third-party libraries can lead to dependencies on potentially unmaintained or poorly supported gems.

Julia features and specs

  • High Performance
    Julia uses Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation which allows it to run at speeds close to those of statically compiled languages like C and Fortran.
  • Ease of Use
    Julia’s syntax is simple and intuitive, similar to that of Python, making it accessible for newcomers and convenient for rapid development.
  • Strong Support for Mathematical Computing
    Designed with numerical and scientific computing in mind, Julia includes powerful mathematical functions and supports arbitrary precision arithmetic.
  • Multiple Dispatch
    Julia's multiple dispatch feature allows functions to be defined across many combinations of argument types which can lead to more flexible and extensible code.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Julia has a growing ecosystem of libraries and tools, supported by an active community, catering to a wide range of applications including data science, machine learning, and more.
  • Interoperability
    Julia can easily call C and Fortran libraries directly without the need for wrappers, and it can also interact with Python, R, and MATLAB code.
  • First-Class Support for Parallelism
    Julia natively supports parallel and distributed computing, enabling efficient handling of large-scale computations.

Possible disadvantages of Julia

  • Immature Ecosystem
    Despite rapid growth, Julia's ecosystem is still not as mature or extensive as those of older, more established languages like Python or R.
  • Long Compilation Time
    The JIT compilation can lead to longer initial startup times for scripts, which might be a drawback for users accustomed to instantaneous execution.
  • Breaking Changes
    The language is still evolving, and updates sometimes include breaking changes that can disrupt existing codebases.
  • Limited Learning Resources
    Compared to other popular languages, there are fewer tutorials, books, and community resources for learning Julia.
  • Smaller Community
    While growing, the Julia community is smaller compared to well-established languages, which might limit the availability of peer support and community-driven development.
  • Package Management Issues
    Users sometimes experience difficulties with package management and dependency issues, especially when using older packages or packages with many dependencies.
  • Less Enterprise Adoption
    Julia has not been widely adopted in the enterprise sector, which can affect its perceived stability and support for mission-critical applications.

Analysis of Ruby

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Ruby is considered a good programming language, especially for web development. Its ease of use, supportive community, and capabilities make it a solid choice for many types of projects.

Why this product is good

  • Ruby, particularly through its popular framework Ruby on Rails, is known for its simplicity and productivity. It features elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write, which makes it an excellent choice for both beginners and seasoned developers. Ruby has a strong community that contributes to a vast number of libraries and tools, enabling developers to build applications quickly and efficiently.

Recommended for

  • Web development, particularly with Ruby on Rails.
  • Prototyping and rapid application development due to its expressive syntax.
  • Startups and small businesses looking to quickly launch web applications.
  • Developers who appreciate human-friendly syntax that emphasizes productivity and readability.

Analysis of Julia

Overall verdict

  • Julia is considered a good programming language, especially for specific applications.

Why this product is good

  • Ecosystem
    Julia has a growing ecosystem of packages and is used increasingly in research and academia.
  • Easy syntax
    Its syntax is easy to learn, especially for those familiar with other high-level programming languages.
  • Performance
    Julia is designed for high-performance numerical and scientific computing. It combines the ease of use of Python with the speed of C.
  • Interoperability
    It can interoperate with other languages like Python, C, and R, allowing users to leverage existing libraries.
  • Multiple dispatch
    It features multiple dispatch, which enables a more expressive style of programming.

Recommended for

    {"data_science" => "Data scientists who require a fast and flexible language for data manipulation and analysis.", "machine_learning" => "Developers looking to implement machine learning models that benefit from Julia's performance.", "numerical_analysis" => "Engineers and analysts conducting numerical analysis that demands high computational efficiency.", "scientific_computing" => "Researchers and scientists working on mathematical, statistical, and computational problems."}

Ruby videos

Ruby Programming Language - Full Course

Julia videos

Julie & Julia Movie Review: Beyond The Trailer

More videos:

  • Review - 'Julie & Julia' review by Michael Phillips
  • Review - Julie & Julia movie review by Kenneth Turan

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ruby and Julia)
Programming Language
47 47%
53% 53
OOP
60 60%
40% 40
Technical Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Generic Programming Language

User comments

Share your experience with using Ruby and Julia. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ruby and Julia

Ruby Reviews

The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
With the growing popularity of Apple operating systems and applications, having Swift programming skills under your belt is a wise investment. Swift shares some similar characteristics with programming languages Ruby and Python.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Julia Reviews

7 Best MATLAB alternatives for Linux
Julia is capable of direct calling C and Fortran libraries. You can create scripts in interactive mode (REPL) and by using its embedding API you can use Julia with other programming languages easily.
15 data science tools to consider using in 2021
Julia 1.0 became available in 2018, nine years after work began on the language; the latest version is 1.6, released in March 2021. The documentation for Julia notes that, because its compiler differs from the interpreters in data science languages like Python and R, new users "may find that Julia's performance is unintuitive at first." But, it claims, "once you understand...
10 Best MATLAB Alternatives [For Beginners and Professionals]
Talking about its capability, Julia can load multidimensional datasets and can perform various actions on them with total ease. Julia has over 13 million downloads as of today. It’s the proof of its flexibility
6 MATLAB Alternatives You Could Use
Strictly speaking, Julia is not a full “alternative” to MATLAB, in the sense that it’s essentially a high-level, dynamic programming language, intended for numerical computing. However, you can easily use it via the free Juno IDE. As for the language itself, it comes with a sophisticated compiler, with support for distributed parallel computing, and a large mathematical...
Source: beebom.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Julia seems to be a lot more popular than Ruby. While we know about 125 links to Julia, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Ruby. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ruby mentions (4)

  • What I posted this week about Ruby
    On Thursday, I shared the importance of contributing to Ruby's documentation, and I wanted to show that even a small contribution can help. Thus, I showed a small PR I submitted for the ruby-lang.org website:. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • A full-stack serverless application with AssemblyLift and Next.js
    The counter function is written in Ruby. Since Ruby is an interpreted language, AssemblyLift deploys a customized Ruby 3.1 interpreter compiled to WebAssembly, which executes the function handler. Since the interpreter is somewhat large, the cold-start time of a Ruby function tends to be larger than that of a Rust function. Our counter is being run in the backround, so we're fine with it being a little bit laggy... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Why is no one promoting ruby?
    But, in general I was told use rubyapi.org unless you _really_ want to stick with the ruby-lang.org docs for all you do (which is fine) or to dig more into some object hierarchy, etc. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Looking for pwsh (core/open source, v7) integration w/ rbenv, asdf
    [2] 'rbenv' - https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv - Ruby version management utility. Run something like rbenv install 3.1.1 to install that version on your system (requires related project ruby-build), then rbenv local 3.1.1 in your code's directory to specify that for any ruby command in that directory only, you want to use version 3.1.1 that you installed through rbenv. Does other useful stuff too. Only does Ruby,... Source: over 3 years ago

Julia mentions (125)

  • Top Programming Languages for AI Development in 2025
    Julia: Exceptional Numerical Processing. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Building a Secret Scanner in Julia: A GitLeaks Alternative
    To use Julia – one of the best programming languages, which is unfairly considered niche. Its applications go far beyond HPC. It’s perfectly suited for solving a wide range of problems. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • A data scientist's journey building a B2B data product with Julia and Pluto
    In this post, I’m exploring dev tools for data scientists, specifically Julia and Pluto.jl. I interviewed Mandar, a data scientist and software engineer, about his experience adopting Pluto, a reactive notebook environment similar to Jupyter notebooks. What’s different about Pluto is that it’s designed specifically for Julia, a programming language built for scientific computing and machine learning. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is Open-Source? Beginners Guide How to Get Started.
    Julia Seasons of Contributions (JSoC). - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • I Chose Common Lisp
    Related, Julia: https://julialang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ruby and Julia, you can also consider the following products

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

JavaScript - Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions

MATLAB - A high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming

C++ - Has imperative, object-oriented and generic programming features, while also providing the facilities for low level memory manipulation

GNU Octave - GNU Octave is a programming language for scientific computing.

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible