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SciPy VS Julia

Compare SciPy VS Julia and see what are their differences

SciPy logo SciPy

SciPy is a Python-based ecosystem of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering.ย 

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.
  • SciPy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-26
  • Julia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15

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

SciPy features and specs

  • Comprehensive Library
    SciPy provides a wide range of scientific and technical computing tools, including modules for optimization, integration, interpolation, eigenvalue problems, algebraic equations, differential equations, statistics, and more.
  • Interoperability
    SciPy is built on top of NumPy, which means it naturally dovetails with other scientific computing libraries in the Python ecosystem, facilitating ease of integration and use in conjunction with libraries like Matplotlib and Pandas.
  • Active Community
    SciPy boasts a large, active community of developers and users, which provides extensive documentation, forums, and regular updates and improvements to the library.
  • Open-source
    Being an open-source library, SciPy promotes collaboration and adaptation, allowing users to contribute to its development and modify its tools to suit specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of SciPy

  • Complexity
    For beginners in scientific computing or programming, the comprehensive nature of SciPy can be overwhelming due to its broad range of functionalities and somewhat steep learning curve.
  • Performance Limitations
    Being a high-level library, SciPy may not be as performant as low-level implementations or specialized tools for very demanding computational tasks or large-scale data processing.
  • Dependency on NumPy
    While SciPy's reliance on NumPy ensures compatibility and ease of use within the Python ecosystem, it also means that its performance and limits are tied to those of NumPy.
  • Windows Limitations
    Some functions and modules of SciPy may not work as efficiently or might encounter compatibility issues when run on Windows operating systems compared to Unix-based systems.

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
    Juliaโ€™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 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."}

SciPy videos

Numerical Computing With NumPy Tutorial | SciPy 2020 | Eric Olsen

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Land on Vector Spaces: Practical Linear Algebra with Python | SciPy 2019 Tutorial | L Barba, T Wang

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 SciPy and Julia)
Data Science And Machine Learning
Programming Language
0 0%
100% 100
Technical Computing
38 38%
62% 62
Data Science Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

SciPy Reviews

25 Python Frameworks to Master
SciPy provides a collection of algorithms and functions built on top of the NumPy. It helps to perform common scientific and engineering tasks such as optimization, signal processing, integration, linear algebra, and more.
Source: kinsta.com
Top 8 Image-Processing Python Libraries Used in Machine Learning
Scipy is used for mathematical and scientific computations but can also perform multi-dimensional image processing using the submodule scipy.ndimage. It provides functions to operate on n-dimensional Numpy arrays and at the end of the day images are just that.
Source: neptune.ai
Top Python Libraries For Image Processing In 2021
SciPy is primarily used for mathematical and scientific computations, but sometimes it can also be used for basic image manipulation and processing tasks using the submodule scipy.ndimage.At the end of the day, images are just multidimensional arrays, SciPy provides a set of functions that are used to operate n-dimensional Numpy operations. SciPy provides some basic image...

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. Itโ€™s the proof of its flexibility
6 MATLAB Alternatives You Could Use
Strictly speaking, Julia is not a full โ€œalternativeโ€ to MATLAB, in the sense that itโ€™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 should be more popular than SciPy. It has been mentiond 127 times since March 2021. 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.

SciPy mentions (17)

  • Intro to Ray on GKE
    The Python Library components of Ray could be considered analogous to solutions like numpy, scipy, and pandas (which is most analogous to the Ray Data library specifically). As a framework and distributed computing solution, Ray could be used in place of a tool like Apache Spark or Python Dask. Itโ€™s also worthwhile to note that Ray Clusters can be used as a distributed computing solution within Kubernetes, as... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Video Generation with Python
    Python has become a popular programming language for different applications, including data science, artificial intelligence, and web development. But, did you know creating and rendering fully customized videos with Python is also possible? At Stack Builders, we have successfully used Python libraries such as MoviePy, SciPy, and ImageMagick to generate videos with animations, text, and images. In this article, we... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Beginning Python: Project Management With PDM
    A majority of software in the modern world is built upon various third party packages. These packages help offload work that would otherwise be rather tedious. This includes interacting with cloud APIs, developing scientific applications, or even creating web applications. As you gain experience in python you'll be using more and more of these packages developed by others to power your own code. In this example... - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Understanding Cosine Similarity in Python with Scikit-Learn
    SciPy: a library used for scientific and technical computing. It has a function that can calculate the cosine distance, which equals 1 minus the cosine similarity. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • PSA: You don't need fancy stuff to do good work.
    Python's pandas, NumPy, and SciPy libraries offer powerful functionality for data manipulation, while matplotlib, seaborn, and plotly provide versatile tools for creating visualizations. Similarly, in R, you can use dplyr, tidyverse, and data.table for data manipulation, and ggplot2, lattice, and shiny for visualization. These packages enable you to create insightful visualizations and perform statistical analyses... Source: over 2 years ago
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Julia mentions (127)

  • Ask HN: Let's learn more about each one, shall we?
    Mine is Julia, although I don't use diary. Nowadays I like SuperCollider. https://julialang.org. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Reflections on 2 years of CPython's JIT Compiler: The good, the bad, the ugly
    > I was active in the Python community in the 200x timeframe, and I daresay the common consensus is that language didn't matter and a sufficiently smart compiler/JIT/whatever would eventually make dynamic scripting languages as fast as C, so there was no reason to learn static languages rather than just waiting for this to happen. To be very pedantic, the problem is not that these are dynamic languages _per se_,... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Top Programming Languages for AI Development in 2025
    Julia: Exceptional Numerical Processing. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Building a Secret Scanner in Julia: A GitLeaks Alternative
    To use Julia โ€“ one of the best programming languages, which is unfairly considered niche. Its applications go far beyond HPC. Itโ€™s perfectly suited for solving a wide range of problems. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • A data scientist's journey building a B2B data product with Julia and Pluto
    In this post, Iโ€™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. Whatโ€™s different about Pluto is that itโ€™s designed specifically for Julia, a programming language built for scientific computing and machine learning. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

NumPy - NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing with Python

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

Pandas - Pandas is an open source library providing high-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python.

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

Matplotlib - matplotlib is a python 2D plotting library which produces publication quality figures in a variety...

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