By default, Julia is run similarly to scripting languages, using its runtime, and allows for interactions,[23] but Julia programs/source code can also optionally be sent to users in one ready-to-install/run file, which can be made quickly, not needing anything preinstalled.[27]
Julia programs can reuse libraries from other languages (or itself be reused from other); Julia has a special no-boilerplate keyword allowing calling e.g. C, Fortran or Rust libraries, and e.g. PythonCall.jl uses it indirectly for you, and Julia (libraries) can also be called from other languages, e.g. Python and R, and several Julia packages have been made easily available from those languages, in the form of Python and R libraries for corresponding Julia packages. Calling in either direction has been implemented for many languages, not just those and C++.
Julia is supported by programmer tools like IDEs (see below) and by notebooks like Pluto.jl, Jupyter, and since 2025 Google Colab officially supports Julia natively.
Julia is sometimes used in embedded systems (e.g. has been used in a satellite in space on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4; 64-bit Pis work best with Julia, and Julia is supported in Raspbian).[28]
^"Smoothing data with Julia's @generated functions". 5 November 2015. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 9 December 2015. Julia's generated functions are closely related to the multistaged programming (MSP) paradigm popularized by Taha and Sheard, which generalizes the compile time/run time stages of program execution by allowing for multiple stages of delayed code execution.
^"LICENSE.md". GitHub. September 2017. Archived from the original on 23 January 2021. Retrieved 20 October 2014.
^ abcdJeff Bezanson; Stefan Karpinski; Viral Shah; Alan Edelman (February 2012). "Why We Created Julia". Julia website. Archived from the original on 2 May 2020. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
^"NVIDIA CUDA ⋅ JuliaGPU". juliagpu.org. Archived from the original on 29 January 2022. Retrieved 17 January 2022. we have shown the performance to approach and even sometimes exceed that of CUDA C on a selection of applications from the Rodinia benchmark suite
^"JuliaCon 2016". JuliaCon. Archived from the original on 4 March 2017. Retrieved 6 December 2016. He has co-designed the programming language Scheme, which has greatly influenced the design of Julia