Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Julia 1.13 highlights

read original more articles
Why This Matters

Julia 1.13 focuses on the language's most persistent pain point: the latency before you get a first result. Precompilation is ~30% faster than 1.12 and startup is ~20% faster, with time-to-first-X now tracked continuously in CI against real community workflows. That matters for scientific and data users who have long weighed Julia's speed against its slow warm-up.

Key Takeaways

Julia version 1.13 has been released. We want to thank all the contributors to this release and all the testers who helped find regressions and issues in the pre-releases. Without you, this release would not have been possible.

The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS file, but here we'll give a more in-depth overview of some of the release highlights.

Ian Butterworth, many others

Julia 1.13 takes roughly 30% less time to precompile packages than 1.12, and roughly 10-20% less time than 1.10 (LTS) depending on the machine.

Time To First X (TTFX), the time from starting Julia to getting a first result, is made up of three main costs: precompiling packages, loading them, and running the code. With the help of the community-submitted workflows at Julia-TTFX-Snippets, we have started measuring these costs more systematically on real-world examples and optimizing Julia against them.

The chart below shows the geometric mean across all 39 currently submitted workflows, on two machines. Precompilation is the fastest of 2 runs; load and execution times are the fastest of 3 runs.

This monitoring is now also part of Julia's own development process: new TTFX CI jobs run on relevant pull requests and on every commit to master , and the results are tracked at perf.julialang.org/ttfx. That tracking went live on September 7, 2026; measurements before then were ad hoc.

Julia 1.13 startup is also ~20% faster than 1.12.

% hyperfine --warmup 3 --runs 20 -N \ --command-name "julia 1.12" "julia +1.12 --startup-file=no -e ''" \ --command-name "julia 1.13" "julia +1.13 --startup-file=no -e ''" Benchmark 1 : julia 1.12 Time (mean ± σ): 69.1 ms ± 1.0 ms [User: 50.1 ms, System: 18.1 ms] Range (min … max): 68.0 ms … 72.6 ms 20 runs Benchmark 2 : julia 1.13 Time (mean ± σ): 56.7 ms ± 0.5 ms [User: 49.1 ms, System: 18.9 ms] Range (min … max): 56.0 ms … 58.1 ms 20 runs Summary julia 1.13 ran 1.22 ± 0.02 times faster than julia 1.12

Timothy, Kristoffer Carlsson

... continue reading