Julia for finite elements

There has been lots of hype in the internet regarding Julia, JIT-compiled programming language for scientific computing. The surprising thing is that the compiler doesn't expect that the code is vectorized and quite often the devectorized versions are even faster. This weekend I ran some preliminary tests of 2D finite element bilinear form assembly code.

My Julia knowledge is very limited and I have learned everything during this weekend. However, still I get very promising improvements over the for-looped MATLAB code that we use for teaching finite elements at my university. The vectorized MATLAB code has been under development for 10 years and a similar code is used for research. With some tweaking of Julia code I'd probably be able to close the gap between the blue and red lines. As a conclusion, Julia project is definitely something that scientific computation people should be following closely.