> The biggest issue with the standard Julia benchmarks is that they're not using what would be optimal C code to compare against. Yes, the C code benchmarks ar

> The biggest issue with the standard Julia benchmarks is that they're not using what would be optimal C code to compare against. Yes, the C code benchmarks are not optimal. Neither are the julia benchmarks or any of the other languages for the matter. The julia devs made a hard decision with those benchmarks and decided that if they allowed arbitrary optimization, the benchmarks would become more a measure of who spent the most time and knowhow writing the benchmarks for ______ language. Instead, they tried to keep the code for all the languages at a reasonable level and avoided super specialized magic. That may make some uncomfortable, but keep in mind that the julia code used in the benchmarks also has a lot of room for improvement. Some julia devs are absolute wizards and getting performance out of julia code if you let them go crazy. > In addition, if you look at the Julia issues on GitHub, you'll find hundreds of performance regressions where code performs more than 10 times as slow as what they expected/claimed at one point. It's not reliably fast, even when written by Julia experts/developers. Julia 0.7 (which is still in its alpha build by the way) included a ground-up replacement of julias iteration protocol and a reworking of a ton of code optimization routines. If you think you or anyone else in the world could take a codebase as large as julia's and replace fundamental parts of it without seeing performance regressions anywhere you're delusional. There are a number of performance regressions, some mysterious and some not mysterious and they will all be worked on because the julia devs take regressions very seriously. It won't be instantaneous, but I do not doubt that the bulk of them will be eliminated promptly. There are also orders of magnitude more performance improvements in 0.7-alpha than there are regressions, they just aren't filed as issues. Some of these performance improvements, especially with broadcasting, are state of the art and not seen in other languages. Calling julia a "language of failed promises" because the alpha build of a pre 1.0 version has some performance regressions is sensationalist and disingenuous.