People here will not be surprised by the conclusion, but for people not familiar with compiled languages it can surely be useful:
Pasdar, Amir Hossein, Shahram Azadi, and Reza Kazemi. ‘A Comparative Study on the Efficiency of Compiled Languages and MATLAB/Simulink for Simulation of Highly Nonlinear Automotive Systems’. Journal of Applied and Computational Mechanics , no. Online First (May 2020). https://doi.org/10.22055/jacm.2020.33053.2137.
Introduction:
Therefore, a comparison between Simulink, which is frequently used by researchers for simulating automotive systems, and Fortran 2003 as a representative of the compiled languages has been performed. The ease of programming in Fortran, providing legacy support for older codes and its superb adaptation to numerical calculation were the main reasons of choosing it over other similar languages like C and C++. MATLAB-like languages like Java and Python were excluded from the comparison as MATLAB is superior in integrity, support and toolboxes to them. Thus, only MATLAB/Simulink and Fortran 2003 were considered for the test.
Conclusion:
This is when a compiled language, especially Fortran as the front-runner in scientific computing, can vastly improve the performance. When it comes to simulating real-world models which are highly detailed and include phase changes in their states, Fortran is able to increase the performance to an unprecedented level. The time spent modeling the system in the compiled language does not considerably differ from the time spent developing a model in Simulink and, furthermore, the final work hour performance value of the Fortran program becomes much lower than the Simulink program which argues the superior productivity of a compiled language for highly nonlinear dynamical systems. Thus, it is reasonable that a compiled language should be considered for modeling and simulating these system types. Especially, if the program has to be repeated for further investigation e.g., designing an optimized controller, a compiled language should be the primary modeling environment as the Simulink program would lead to diminishing results.