Thanks for the comment, @oscardssmith.
Before joining this forum, I had barely heard of Julia. Some of the posts in fortran-lang.discourse named Julia as a threat to Fortran, so I searched and read some articles claiming that Julia was xxx times faster than Fortran, etc. I felt that the claims were not credible, and wanted to give Julia a test-drive. I downloaded the 1.7.2 distribution for Windows, and ran a few examples of nonlinear regression.
The Fortran version compiles and links in ~ 2 seconds, and the run takes less than a second. A second run of the EXE takes 0.04 s, since the DLLs are now cached. The Julia version took 25 seconds for the first run, of which 17 s were used to process the directive using PyPlot . A second run while staying within the Julia REPL took 0.4 s. What disappointed me was the inability to compile stable source code into object files, EXEs and libraries and the huge startup time for running any Julia program unless one stays inside the REPL.