Linguagem de programação JULIA: uma alternativa open source e de alto desempenho ao MATLAB

Abstract

The MATLAB is one of the main software used in exact sciences and engineering courses for the teaching of programming and numerical scientific research, because of its high level syntax and several toolboxes from your friendly programming environment. Despite the many advantages, it is proprietary software that presents the high cost of licensing for Educational Institutions and individual use. Besides, it has closed source code and native programs “.m” is not fully compatible in other programming environments that support this file format. Although there are free software’s and open-source projects with relative similarity of IDE and code syntax, many of these have lower computing performance when compared to MATLAB. Thus, the present study aims to present the programming language JULIA as an alternative to MATLAB in numerical and symbolic programming education, and scientific research. In this work the characteristics of the two programming languages are compared and benchmark computations between the languages are presented in which it is evaluated the runtime and the results of the calculations. For this, it has been implemented the Recursive Fibonacci series algorithms, Berstein polynomials 2D plots, native functions of symbolic calculus, algebraic operations and Runge-Kutta 45 solution for numerical differential equation. JULIA has shown competitive performance compared to MATLAB in the tests made, being an interesting alternative in engineering education and research.