[chalst]

> One of my biggest complaints with Julia is that zealots for the language insist these permeating abstractions are costless, but they totally aren’t.

This sounds like it might be interesting, but your later comments about overhead and abstraction costs sounds like you maybe don't understand what Julia's JIT is actually doing and how it leverages multiple dispatch and unboxing. Could you be a bit more concrete?

[mlthoughts2018]

No I think that’s what I’m saying. When raising the issue that using multiple dispatch this way is premature abstraction that has intrinsic costs, all I get is the religious pamphlet about multiple dispatch.

[oivey]

In practice the multiple dispatch overhead is elided by the compiler. If it can’t be you’re doing something truly dynamic, which is generally unavoidably slower. It’s still a better place to be than everything being a generic Object type.

[mlthoughts2018]

The nice thing about Cython is that you can have both - all the multiple dispatch you want with fused types, or escape that paradigm to do other things if you desire. It gives a lot of surgical control.

[oivey]

I don’t think that is true. As far as I know, Cython let’s you do function overloading and single dispatch via class inheritance. I think you also miss out on the type inference that lets you do things like pipe dual numbers through functions without any dispatch related overhead.